Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was changed to Raku in October 2019. Though Perl is not an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since it has undergone many changes and revisions. Raku, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000 evolved into a separate language. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from one another; the Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, shell script, AWK, sed. They provide text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools, facilitating manipulation of text files.

Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its unsurpassed regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration, network programming, finance and other applications, such as for GUIs, it has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, its ugliness. In 1998, it was referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together," in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance. Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys, released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987. The language expanded over the next few years. Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added; the only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page. In 1991, Programming Perl, known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language.

At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version, well documented by the book. Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994; the perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, it added many new features to the language, including objects, lexical variables, modules. Modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter; this allowed the core interpreter to stabilize as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features. Perl 5 has been in active development since then. Perl 5.001 was released on March 13, 1995.

Perl 5.002 was released on February 1996 with the new prototypes feature. This allowed module authors to make subroutines. Perl 5.003 was released June 1996, as a security release. One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support. On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules. Perl 5.004 was released on May 15, 1997, included, among other things, the UNIVERSAL package, giving Perl a base object to which all classes were automatically derived and the ability to require versions of modules. Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language. Perl 5.004 added support for Microsoft Windows and several other operating systems. Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998. This release included several enhancements to the regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the B::* modules, the qr// regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS.

Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, support for files over 2 GiB, the "our" keyword; when developing Perl 5.6, the decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects. In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community; the process resulted in 361 RFC documents that were to be used in guiding development of Perl 6. In 2001, work began on the "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl, they were presented as a digest of the RFCs, rather than a formal document. At this point, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language. Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, had nearly yearly updates since then. Pe

Lieuwe Westra is a Dutch former professional racing cyclist, who rode professionally between 2006 and 2016 for the KrolStonE Continental Team, Vacansoleil–DCM and Astana teams. Born in Mûnein), Westra finished second at the 2012 Paris–Nice, a UCI World Tour race; this particular stage finished atop the Côte de la Croix-Neuve–Montée Laurent Jalabert – a 3 km climb at an average gradient of 10.1%. He attacked inside the final kilometer and the lead group piloted by race leader Bradley Wiggins could not reel him in, he freewheeled over the finishing line, sparking speculation that he could have put on the leader's jersey had he pursued his effort, since the win put him 6 seconds in arrears of Wiggins. He would finish Paris-Nice 8 seconds down on the Briton in the general classification. In August, Westra won the overall classification of the 2012 Danmark Rundt, a six-stage race held in Denmark, he won the event's individual time trial, helping him seal the victory as it netted him the leader's jersey, which he would not relinquish.

Ramunas Navardauskas of the Garmin–Barracuda squad finished second with a deficit of 10 seconds. Westra earned his first victory of the 2013 season at the Tour of California, where he foiled the sprinters' plans by breaking away with 5 km and managed to resist to the lead group. Francisco Mancebo joined him in his bid for victory, the pair cooperated and Westra won the two-man sprint. After five years with the Vacansoleil–DCM team, Westra joined Astana on a two-year contract, for the 2014 and 2015 seasons. On Sunday 8 January 2017, Westra announced his retirement via his Facebook page, he wrote. I cannot afford to continue. Thanks to A Boskamp and K Snijder! Ok I stop but go now and I have time to solve these issues Thanks to cycling world ciaoooo westra"; this post was subsequently deleted, however the next day the retirement was confirmed via the Twitter account for the Wanty–Groupe Gobert team. List of Dutch Olympic cyclists Lieuwe Westra at Cycling Archives Lieuwe Westra's Profile on Cycling Base Official website Lieuwe Westra on Twitter

Paul Lakeland is the Rev. Aloysius P. Kelley, S. J. Professor of Catholic Studies and Chair of the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield and was the 2005 Fairfield University Teacher of the Year. Lakeland was awarded the first place 2004 Catholic Press Award, in the category of theology, for his book, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church. Lakeland is the Director of the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield and is host of the Voices of Others video series in which he sits down with distinguished scholars and social activists to discuss issues surrounding the theme “Listening to the Voices of Others.” Past special guests include Loung Ung, Greg Boyle, Paul Farmer, Archbishop Demetrios of America. Lakeland is a contributing writer to Commonweal. Lakeland, a former Jesuit priest, is married and has one son, Jonathan Palmer Lakeland, a professional pianist and conductor, he is a recent graduate of the world-renowned Westminster Choir College.

Paul Lakeland has been a member of the group Voice of the Faithful. Lakeland has come out in support of controversial theologian Roger Haight in the magazine Commonweal. In January 2007, he published an impassioned apologia of his thought by the title "Not So Heterodox. In Defense of Roger Haight." Lakeland received his MA from Oxford University. Lakeland believes that change is inevitable, he further believes. Lakeland claims those church leaders who allowed child sex abuse to continue were less responsive over the duty to act accountably than lay Catholics who have had to act accountably towards employers and family. During the first few centuries of the Christian Era the laity played a part in the choice of clergy up to and including the pope. Pope Leo the Great is quoted pronouncing, "Let the one, going to rule over all be elected by all", he believes the church has traditionally been sensitive to political models that were contemporary at the time and believes it would be good if the church were today more democratic.

Lakeland feels the church should seek to imitate the Holy Trinity where he feels the three persons are coequal and not hierarchal. In his view, the church is in crisis and losing credibility due to, "the wholly human predilection for rules, buildings, power over others, silence and expediency." Demands for unthinking obedience to a hierarchical authority reduce the church to something purely human. Lakeland believes good order in the church is God given but pyramidal power structure that existed since medieval times is not conducive to good order; the church has lost credibility. He considers that Catholic bishops are out of step with lay Catholics over acceptance of sexual diversity and same sex relationships. Lay Catholics are accepting while the church hierarchy demands lifelong celibacy from people with non heterosexual orientation. Lakeland feels both sides should examine what the other side says but suspects the church hierarchy are wrong when they seek to deny people with same sex orientation the chance of love.

Church: Living Communion Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity Can Save the Church The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age Theology and Critical Theory: The Discourse of the Church Free in Christ: The Challenge of Political Theology The Politics of Salvation: The Hegelian Idea of the State Can Women Be Priests?. Aloysius P. Kelley, S. J. Chair in Catholic Studies Profile The Huffington Post Blog Interview to Instituto Humanitas Unisinos - IHU, titled "Fr Haight, silenced by the Vatican, the quest to make the Christian message intelligible in postmodernity"