Larry Wall, ÔPerl, the first postmodern computer languageÕ, http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

Perl (an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language") is a high-level programming language, first developed for Unix by Larry Wall in 1987, and developed as an open source project. The language uses highly flexible syntax and concise regular expression operators, making it particularly dense and difficult to read for the uninitiated. The syntax is, however, really relatively simple and powerful. Perl programs are generally stored as text source files, which are compiled into virtual machine code at run-time. Perl programs are usually called 'Perl scripts'. The program that interprets/compiles Perl code is called "perl", typically "/usr/local/bin/perl" or "/usr/bin/perl". 

Perl and Linux have something in common emerging out of Unix culture. Perl is, by and large, a digested and simplified version of Unix (and by extension Linux). Larry Wall sees a further connection to postmodernism, but his views are based upon a series of theoretical misconceptions. For instance, he is keen to point out that modernist culture was based on 'or' rather than 'and', something that postmodern culture reverses. Clearly he has not read Berman's argument that dialectical thinking asserts 'and-both' over 'either-or'. Disregarding the clumsy  descriptions of postmodernism and deconstruction, Wall points out that in Perl 'AND has higher precedence than OR does'. Perhaps more usefully, he points to the eclecticism of Perl, combining and appropriating other languages, working against concepts like originality. Importantly, Perl like Linux is an open source project, emerging out of a culture of sharing. 

Wall claims that one of Perl's features is to focus attention not so much on the problem but on the person trying to solve the problem, on the creativity of the programmer: 'It doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program.'