Re: Possible Ideas for Presentation

At 03:02 PM 1/19/00 -0500, James J. Gundy wrote:
>I was wondering if anyone else had any other suggestions on the
>advantages of Perl.

I find this satisfies the "show, don't tell" principle quite well.  I saved 
the below from www.perl.org some time ago.  I can't find it there any more:

Perl "Too Good"

This is a true story. Names have not been changed.

     UCLA's Computer Science Undergraduate Association regularly hosts its 
programming competition.
     Contestants are given six complex problems and have three hours to 
write programs to solve as many of
     the problems as possible. In 1997, the rules stated that any 
programming language could be used so long
     as you solved the problem, so then-undergraduate Keith Chiem entered 
and used Perl.

     Keith did not merely win, he conquered. He solved five of the six 
problems in the three hours allotted.
     The second-place two-person team solved only three problems. They, 
needless to say, were not using
     Perl.

     But if you're a UCLA undergraduate contemplating entering the contest 
and using Perl, don't bother. After
     Keith's conquest, Perl was banned from the contest.

     You've got to admire a language that is banned because it makes 
problems too easy to solve.

These days, Keith is a sysadmin at Yahoo! Inc., and is wondering what to do 
with the copy of Visual C++ that was
his prize.

--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies