http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=99592

One of the common attitudes I've seen (elsewhere) on the net is that Perl isn't a "true" language. Unfortunately, most of the things I've seen in Perl are things for which this might very well appear to be true- Perl programs with GUIs are few and far between, and there are very few programs which would hold appeal for people other than sysadmins and their ilk.

Further, many people hold the opinion that Perl is good only for data munging (Like, say, Practical Extraction and Reports ;-) and CGI, but if you want to do REAL work, you should use some other language.

Has anyone seen any truely impressive programs built in Perl which do whiz-bang things, have shiny bells and whistles which impress PHBs, and generally demonstrates that Perl is both easy to use AND powerful?

Update:
(In case I wasn't clear enough above, this is not a criticism of Perl... I love it, but have a hard time convincing other people of its merits.)

Update II: On a slightly more glib note, one might note that Perl is easily provable to be a "true" language. Need to convince someone?

if("Perl") { print "I told you it was \"True\"!!"; }