Yes, on this day in 1987 Larry Wall released Perl 1.0 on the comp.sources.misc newsgroup. So, that means 20 years of easing the text-processing headaches of countless programmers around the world!
I've been using Perl for some time now and it never ceases to amaze me with its ability to handle text manipulation tasks that would take ages to code in Java even with all its libraries, forget about C! Though, then Java would take ages to run, unlike C.