 <p>Most of the answers here I don't think are really going to wow anyone, especially a tech crowd. They might be surprised that Perl can do it, but they aren't going to be surprised that you can do the task. However, even if they aren't surprised that you can do it, they might be surprised how fast, or with how little code, you can do it.</p> <p>If you're looking for things to show them that will wow them, you have to figure out what they think is hard in their jobs and see if Perl could make it really easy. I find that people tend not to care if a language can do something they don't already have an interest in. That being said, impressing anyone with Perl is the same as impressing anyone in any other subject of field: you have to know them and what they will be impressed by. You have to know your audience.</p> <p>Perl doesn't really have any special features that allow it to do any one thing that some other language can also do. However, Perl combines a lot of features that you usually don't find in the same programming language.</p> <p>Most of the things that I'm impressed by have almost nothing to do with the language:</p> <ul> <li><p>There's a single codebase that runs on a couple hundred different platforms, despite differences in architecture.</p></li> <li><p>Perl's <a href="http://search.cpan.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CPAN</a> is still unrivaled among other languages (which is really sad because it's so easy to do the same thing for other languages).</p></li> <li><p>The testing culture has really raised the bar in Perl programming, and there's a lot of work that teases out platform dependencies, cross-module issues, and so on without the original developer having to do much.</p></li> </ul>