I was in a bar the other day talking with somebody about Perl. He asked, "what is some great Perl code I could read?" He was looking for a non-trivial amount of production Perl 5 code that elegantly solves a problem, and is beautiful to read.
I'm couldn't answer that. The code I see is either beautiful to read but fairly boring in what it does OR is an elegant solution but is terrifying to read (for example, autodie). I'm a biased observer, I work mostly with the plumbing so I see mostly the scary stuff that implements the elegant solutions.
What code would you show a non-Perl programmer read that is both beautiful and interesting?
Alas, most of my great code is great because it's so trivial for that job.
I like Dist::Zilla.
The plugin system is very nice.
AppConfig by Andy Wardley is widely used, nontrivial in what it does (reading complex configuration data from various sources), and beautiful to read.
Games::Pentominos by myself is not very useful, but also nontrivial in what it does (solving a paving puzzle by recursive trial and error), and I shamelessly think it is quite nice to read, displaying a number of Perl features (regexes, functional grep/map, compilation on the fly, etc.).
