How can I impress people with Perl's capabilities? [closed]

Question

I would like to give a presentation for my co-workers that will show off some amazing things that Perl can do, things that would make programmers and non-programmers alike say to themselves, "WHOA you can do that?!" I really want to turn heads, since many are of the mindset that Perl is a dying language, but also be fun and entertaining.

Some ideas I have are demos of the following modules:

• Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
• WWW::Mechanize
• Image::Magick

Any recommendations or comments?

BTW we are a tech company (run a data center) so the computer literacy of my co-workers is high.

Answer 1

Years ago, when I was first learning how to program, my girlfriend's cousin showed me a Perl script he'd written which contacted a database containing the positions of all known satellites, and calculated the flyover times for the largest objects, like the space station Mir. The script ran via cron on a server he ran, and it would run periodically and then send him a page about 5 minutes before the given object was visible overhead in the night sky. As we were walking around town, he could get everybody's attention by suddenly pointing up and saying "LOOK!", and everybody ooohed and ahhhed right as the satellite cruised overhead.

I was really impressed by that script at the time, since I had no idea how to write a program nearly that complex. Now that I would have a much better idea, I still think it made a good demo, as it showed something novel that could be done with the language in a relatively short amount of time and with little sweat. So I'd say to pick something novel or interesting, and emphasize Perl's economy of language, and its networking capabilities.