The following (somewhat paraphrased) article, entitled "What is Perl", comes from The Perl Journal (Used with permission.)
Perl is a general purpose programming language developed in 1987 by Larry Wall. It has become the language of choice for WWW development, text processing, Internet services, mail filtering, graphical programming, and every other task requiring portable and easily-developed solutions.
Perl is interpreted. This means that as soon as you write your program, you can run it - there's no mandatory compilation phase. The same Perl program can run on Unix, Windows, NT, MacOS, DOS, OS/2, VMS and the Amiga.
Perl is collaborative. The CPAN software archive contains free utilities written by the Perl community, so you save time.
Perl is free. Unlike most other languages, Perl is not proprietary. The source code and compiler are free, and will always be free.
Perl is fast. The Perl interpreter is written in C, and a decade of optimisations have resulted in a fast executable.
Perl is complete. The best support for regular expressions in any language, internal support for hash tables, a built-in debugger, facilities for report generation, networking functions, utilities for CGI scripts, database interfaces, arbitrary-precision arithmetic - are all bundled with Perl.
Perl is secure. Perl can perform "taint checking" to prevent security breaches. You can also run a program in a "safe" compartment to avoid the risks inherent in executing unknown code.
Perl is open for business. Thousands of corporations rely on Perl for their information processing needs.
Perl is simple to learn. Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Perl handles tedious tasks for you, such as memory allocation and garbage collection.
Perl is concise. Many programs that would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other programming languages can be expressed in a pageful of Perl.
Perl is object oriented. Inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation are all provided by Perl's object oriented capabilities.
Perl is flexible The Perl motto is "there's more than one way to do it." The language doesn't force a particular style of programming on you. Write what comes naturally.
Perl is fun. Programming is meant to be fun, not only in the satisfaction of seeing our well-tuned programs do our bidding, but in the literary act of creative writing that yields those programs. With Perl, the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.