Time and time again I find people that know the tiniest little bit of Perl, and find it kind of useful, but not really compelling.

Until you introduce them to CPAN, usually via http://search.cpan.org/. And then their entire outlook changes.

I've seen people come into work the next day after spending the evening browsing through it with a light in their eyes and talking about some private project they'd always wanted to do but it took too much work, but there's these modules that will make it really easy to do this, and that, and etc etc.

Perl is the language for "getting stuff done" and CPAN is it's heart, and a good part of it's soul.

Regardless of what you teach about the syntax of the language, from the point of view of comparing it with various other languages, no introduction would be complete without...

"Perl is relatively unique amoungst the more common languages in that it has the CPAN, which is a repository of 16,000,000 lines of code by 3000 different Perl authors to do just about anything you could think of, and that are completely free for both personal and commercial use"

If they are more businessey types, my Perl introduction is generally something like this.

"Perl is the language for getting stuff done and getting it done fast. The first versions of Amazon were written in Perl. The first versions of Yahoo were written in Perl. The first versions of eBay were written in Perl."

And that's about puts it in the right perspective for them. :)

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