Perl is a powerful, feature-rich programming language that has been in development for over 30 years. Perl is a powerful, feature-rich programming language that has been in development for over 30 years. Perl can be used on more than 100 platforms, from mainframes to portables. It is well-suited for rapid prototyping as well as large-scale development projects. "Perl" is a language family. "Raku", formerly "Perl 6", is a part of this family. However, it is a separate language with its own development team. Its existence does not have any impact on the development of Perl. Perl has powerful tools to process text, making it ideal for working in HTML, XML and other mark-up languages. Perl can handle encrypted Web data including e-commerce transactions.