In the perl man-page, since Perl 1, it has included both the backronyms Practical Extraction and Report Language and later Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister in the BUGS section. In fact Perl never stood for either, and both backronyms were due to Larry Wall himself, before he ever released his creation on an unsuspecting world.
Larry doesn't care much about the issue either way. If you find the language useful, then great. If you don't, well OK. But he doesn't care to argue about what you call it.
It is other people who have made a big issue over this. I'm not sure how it came to be, but knowing this piece of trivia has become essentially a "secret handshake" to identify who has been a part of online Perl communities, and who has not. This is useful enough that I use it that way myself, even though I don't care how you call it.
As for the fact that Perl gets to be a proper name while the instantiation doesn't, blame Unix. That the Perl executable is called perl is due to Unix convention, and since Unix is case-sensitive, it is very important to capitalize that correctly. The language itself is capitalized because by convention most language names are capitalized. For example we write Python, Visual Basic, Ruby, Lisp (even though that really was an acronym), and so on.
But note that those languages that have Unix implementations have lower-case executables. Therefore at heart Perl/perl is no more a violation of standard English capitalization rules than Python/python, Ruby/ruby, Sendmail/sendmail, Mozilla/mozilla and many other examples.
In reply to Re^6: top ten things every Perl hacker should know
by tilly
in thread top ten things every Perl hacker should know
by apotheon
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |