Perl, Python, and Java

Larry Wall, a linguist and programmer, released Perl in 1987, designing it primarily for text processing, report generation, and system administration tasks on Unix. Perl absorbed features from shell scripting, C, sed, awk, and regular expressions, earning a reputation as the internet's "duct tape" during the 1990s, when it powered a large share of early CGI web scripts. Perl's flexible, sometimes cryptic syntax, embodied in its own motto "there's more than one way to do it," made it extraordinarily expressive for experienced users, but it was also criticized as prone to producing dense, hard-to-read "write-only" code.