Perl: the language that showed us brevity.<p>Despite all its various layers of madness, it made a generation of programmers more productive than they&#x27;d known was possible. Tasks that used to be major undertakings often boiled down to simple scripts. Python, Ruby and many other languages since have borrowed from and built upon the brevity that Perl first showed us and it&#x27;s unlikely that people will ever go back to the verbosity that used to be common for text processing and sys admin tasks.