Today is Perl's 20th birthday!

The cryptic programming language that we all love, was released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 (CVS date, was published to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on February 01, 1988).

You can read it here.

The original manpage:
http://www.isc.org/sources/devel/lang/perl.txt

Take a look at the Perl Timeline

Perl 5.10 was also released today and Perl6 is under constant development.

While we're still at it, a book on Catalyst (Perl's most popular web application framework) was recently published.