What is Perl and why is it useful?

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that was first developed in 1987 by Larry Wall. It is known for its powerful text processing capabilities and its ability to easily interface with other programming languages and systems. Perl is particularly useful for tasks such as data manipulation, text processing, system administration, web development, and network programming. It's also commonly used in bioinformatics and other scientific research. Perl's syntax is designed to be easy to learn and use, and its built-in regular expression support and large library of modules make it a powerful tool for many types of tasks. Due to its versatility and ease of use, Perl is still widely used today and is considered one of the most popular programming languages.