So this is a bit of a tangent, but…
(Also, note that I’m going to be using the Latin and Greek terminology for this post. There are plenty of other conventions, most mutually incompatible. Consider yourselves warned.)
A lot of languages conflate the categories of tense and aspect. English is one of the few that doesn’t!
Tense establishes a reference point for the action. That reference point could be in the past, present, or future, or you can get more fine-grained with it: Lingála has separate tenses for “within the past day” and “before that”, for example, known as the recent and the distant tenses.
Aspect establishes how the action relates to the reference point. Is it a single event without further detail (aorist), or an ongoing thing with the reference point in the middle of it (imperfect), or is it over and done, and what we’re talking about at the time of the reference point is the aftereffects (perfect)?
In English, these can be combined in any combination you like: “did”, “do”, or “will” for tense, then “have” for perfect, “be” for imperfect, or nothing for aorist. So for example, “I eat”, “I am eating”, and “I have eaten” are all present tense, but three different aspects: aorist, imperfect, perfect. The past tense versions of those three would be “I ate”, “I was eating”, and “I had eaten”. And so on.
In Latin and Greek, though, they can’t be: you only have certain combinations available to pick from. So those combinations get particular names; the present perfect is the perfectus, “finished”, so the past perfect is the plus quam perfectus, “more than finished”. Throw in a few centuries for Latin to turn into French, and those become the “perfect” and “pluperfect”.
A related variable is mood, which again is sometimes an orthogonal thing (you can mix and match it) and is sometimes mutually exclusive. This is where you get things like subjunctive (for things that may not be true) and optative (for things that you wish would be true). Lingála has some especially fun ones here as well, like the gnomic (things that are universally true in all times and places, like “humans need to breathe”) and the ultimate (this wasn’t always true, but it’s true now, and it will always be true in the future, it can never be undone, like “Bob died”).
And then you get evidentiality: some languages mark verbs explicitly for how you know the information, if it’s firsthand, reported, and so on. And more! All of these categories usually overlap—gnomic could be taken as an evidentiality instead of a mood, for example—so often linguists now just call them “TAM” (tense, aspect, mood, and so on) to mean “all the details you can mark on a verb”.