The one thing that I know Perl can do, and in my opinion no other language can do better, is to start small and grow. With Perl you can approach a problem and spike different parts of it very quickly and then you can reshape the code in many different directions and using multiple paradigms. This ability to iterate very rapidly with minimal loss and with freedom of testing out different directions is really unique to Perl. I don't think any other computer language has this.

Mojolicious captures this concept beautifully, and I think THAT is the essence of Perl, and that is is why is my goto language for everything.

IMHO goes way beyond TIMTOWTDI and I don't think ww are even able to describe it properly.