Re^2: Get me excited about perl

[jatill]

Yes, these are a group of programmers of various languages. We use perl at the University of Buffalo for a lot of web content as well as batch programming, though specifics aren't that important. The main goal is to get people interested in and curious about the language, even if they might never use it for work.

[irirgem]

Interesting audience. I would start out with something like

'Perl is one of the richest open cross-platform languages out there today... It's been actively supported by a community of developers since 19XX and is routinely called the Open-Source toolkit.'

Bottom line is I've been doing Perl for so long I've forgotten a lot of the other languages I've used... simply because I have yet to find something Perl can't do for me.
Once I started, I haven't looked back :)

I guess the trick would be to grab their attention at the git-go and then show them the Perl OO mechanism, a traditional method (something like top-down design) and then the 'scratch-pad gotta have it now' script. Showing some flexibility and emphasizing the code is as good as the coder.