$ perldoc perl | tail -n 14
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but
don't tell anyone I said that.
NOTES
The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how
many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience,
and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
perl v5.14.2 2012-07-12 PERL(1)
In conversation with Larry Wall I found out that the existence of two reasonable backronyms was part of why he chose to call it Perl. Therefore the backronyms were known before the name itself was finalized.
Really? I have never heard that before. I have heard that it was going to be "Pearl" but there was something else out there with that name and so it ended up "Perl".
My source is conversation with Larry Wall at lunch at OSCON in, I believe, 2006.
And yes, I've heard the Pearl claim before. As well as the claim that the original acronym was going to be Practical Extraction And Reporting Language.
All of the claims that I have heard fit together if you assume that the actual sequence of events was this. Larry wanted to name it pearl for whatever combination of reasons. Came up with a nice acronym for it. Decided not to name it pearl for whatever combinations of reasons. Was playing around and came up with the Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Preferred that over pearl for various reasons (not in use, greppable, likes puns, etc). And therefore named the language perl. Therefore the language name is not an acronym, but both popular backronyms predate the actual language name.
I was not present. But this is my best guess as to what did happen.
