> You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I’ve often told the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was working on a secret NSA project, so I won’t repeat that here, since it’s no secret. Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can’t explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with “Pearl” instead.
> “Perl” is usually glossed as “Practical Extraction and Report Language,” and occasionally as “Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.” Both are retronyms. Originally, Larry wanted to name his new language Pearl, a word with positive connotations. Larry considers himself as much a linguist as a hacker. He’s also a fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. There are doorways into Tolkien’s imagination built right into the core of Perl. Each section of the source code begins with a quote from the Rings trilogy – say, “A fair jaw-cracker dwarf language must be.” If you understand the epigram, you comprehend what that section is designed to do. Larry wanted to give Perl a name that suggested that it was worth treasuring.
> Furthermore, Larry is a devout Christian – he’s the son of a fundamentalist Mennonite preacher from a long line of preachers. In the 13th book of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of a merchant “seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it” – “it” being the Kingdom of Heaven. But there was already another programming language called Pearl. So Larry – whose personal motto, which has become the mantra of the Perl community, is “There’s more than one way to do it” – christened his new creation Perl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name