VANCOUVER, British Columbia – December 18, 2003 – On December 18, ActiveState, a leading provider of professional tools for programmers, celebrates Perl's sixteenth birthday and its continued popularity. Considered to be the "duct tape of the internet", Perl is one of the web's most popular programming languages due to its robustness, text manipulation abilities, and rapid development cycle. An open source programming language, Perl was created by Larry Wall and is contributed to by thousands of Perl advocates around the world.

A testament to interest in Perl is a recent milestone for ActiveState's flagship software, ActivePerl, which reached its 7 millionth download on December 7. As a result of Perl's continued momentum, ActiveState has made upgrades to four Perl-related products in the past two months, and just released ActivePerl 5.8.2.

Perl is known for its process, file, and text manipulation abilities, and is primarily used for quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, networking, and World Wide Web programming. System administrators and CGI script authors are some of its biggest fans.

A small sampling of leading organizations that use Perl on a daily basis include Disney, AOL, UC Berkeley, Lockheed Martin, Walgreens, Citigroup, Stanford University, BAE, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cingular Wireless, HP, Northwest Airlines, Ticketmaster, Siemens, IBM, and Raytheon.

"Perl's evolution is a great open source success story. Perl's flexibility and power combined with the curiosity and enthusiasm of developers around the world who wanted to "scratch their own itch", has brought about a language with thousands of modules available to everyone — that can do just about anything you need to with a computer. It's no wonder that Perl is so pervasive," said David Ascher, chief technologist, ActiveState.

ActiveState Perl tool releases in the past few months alone include the Solaris release of the Komodo IDE, Perl Dev Kit 5.3, Visual Perl 1.8.1, and ActivePerl 5.8.1.807. ActivePerl is ActiveState's quality-assured distribution of Perl, available for Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It contains the Perl language, the Perl Package Manager, (for installing CPAN packages), and complete online help. As part of ActiveState's support for Perl, the ActivePerl package is available for free. More information is at: https://www.ActiveState.com/Perl

Happy sixteenth birthday Perl. May there be many more good years ahead!