Your Daily Dose of Incoherent Perl Humour

[Shlomi Fish]

Hello birds and blokes!

As promised I'm now sending an on-topic (or is it off-topic) post about Perl 
Humour, or at least what I hope is in fact humour. Without further ado here 
goes:

1. Larry Wall Facts:
--------------------

I've been talking to an Israeli Ruby developer without a lot of Perl 
experience. He's been making jokes about Perl, but none of them were funny. 
However, I often find the jokes the Perl'ers make on Freenode's #perl very 
funny. So my guess is that he doesn't really understand Perl well.

He also didn't understand these "Larry Wall Facts":

( http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/32866 )

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
* Larry Wall can understand the Perl code he wrote last year.

* Larry gets the colon.

* There are at least 137 Larry Walls in the U.S. but only one that matters.

* Larry Wall applies a patch manually quicker than GNU patch.

* Larry Wall dreams in Perl.

* Larry Wall can program in his sleep.

* Larry Wall is lazy, impatient and full of hubris.

* Larry Wall has more dollars in the bank than in his Perl code.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now, I find them funny, but it may be only because I invented them. I'll 
appreciate any additions.

================

2. Chuck Norris and Perl 6
---------------------------

This was recorded on #perl6:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
    <rindolf>  ajs: perhaps Chuck Norris would be a useful addition to
               the Pugs and Parrot teams.
        <ajs>  rindolf: If Norris can write, give him a commit bit, and
               tie him to a keyboard ;)
 <FurnaceBoy>  I thought he already had commit
      <daxim>  Chuck Norris commits with a roundhouse kick into the SVN
               server's head
            *  FurnaceBoy chuckles
        <ajs>  daxim: If you can get that to pass the test suite, then
               more power to you!
 <FurnaceBoy>  Chuck *is* the test suite
    <Kattana>  chuck norris does not code, when he sits at a
               computer, it just does whatever he wants.
    <rindolf>  Kattana: :-)
      <daxim>  ah, we're easy to amuse
        <ajs>  Be the test suite, Chuck... BE the test suite.
 <FurnaceBoy>  you gotta pass 'make chuck'
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

===================

3. The Cost of Newlines:
------------------------

On Freenode #perl:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
     <rindolf>  sleeper: why are people obsessed with one-liners?
     <rindolf>  It takes 3 lines - OMG what a disaster!
       <Botje>  rindolf: newline prices went up again
     <rindolf>  Botje: I buy my newlines in the black market
 <dabreegster>  Botje: again? drat.
             *  Botje reports rindolf to the newline police
 <dabreegster>  Botje: I know about an... (underground) operation going on to
                pirate newlines.
     <rindolf>  Botje: I bribed a few cops in the newline police, but nice              
                try.
 <dabreegster>  Botje: Some crazy guys are trying to free newlines from 
                patents! They want to rid the market!
             *  cursor gets called up to serve in the newline jury
     <rindolf>  I think we need to start a campaign to lift all restrictions 
                off newlines.
 <dabreegster>  rindolf: La Resistance lives on!\n
       <Botje>  I already stockpiled millions of newlines
 <dabreegster>  Botje: We can have the one-liners destroyed by sundown
 <dabreegster>  Not destroyed, but... TURNED INTO TWO-LINERS! Mwuhahaha!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

========

4. Perl 6 Mottos:
-----------------

Some Perl 6 facts (don't take too seriously):

* Perl 6 - all your paradigms are belong to us. (not mine)

* Perl 6 would be a wonderful language. Too bad it isn't going to be Perl. 
(mine sort of, by inspiration from what was said on Fortran '90)

* Perl 6 - the second system effect done right. (lwall's).

* Perl 6 is the language Duke Nukem Forever will be written in. I'm going to 
be the one who will port it from GNU/Hurd to FreeBSD. (old joke, I know).

* Perl 6 - there are too many ways to do it.

======

5. "Ways to do it according to the programming languages of the world"
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote this piece originally and published it here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/ways_to_do_it.html

Now someone took it from there and published it on a Ruby wiki under humour, 
only changing the Perl description, and adding a few not-so-funny-IMHO 
additions of his own. It was slightly revised, since its inception.

Enjoy!

* Perl - There's more than one way to do it. 
* C++ - There are 5 ways to do it, 3 out of which are not supposed to work. 
* Visual Basic - The only way to do it is to use a third party component. 
* ANSI C - There is usually one way to do it, but there's more than one way to    
  optimise it. 
* Java - There's barely one way to do it. (But as opposed to C++ it is  
  guaranteed to work.) 
* Python - There's only one way to do it. The one true way of doing it. And 
  then there are others. 
* COBOL - The only way to do it is to use something else. 
* Common LISP - There is a infinite series of ways to do it, increasing in 
  elegance, and decreasing in legibility. 
* Scheme - There are several ways to do it, but you have to chart all of them   
  yourself. 
* Haskell - You can think of any number of ways to do it, but only one will 
  have a reasonable time or space complexity. 
* Forth - There are several ways to write it, but no way to read it. 
* HTML - There are many ways to do it. Most of them should be avoided at all 
  costs, and the other ones should better be generated with something else. 
* The C Preprocessor - There's not supposed to be a way to do it. 
* Fortran - there isn't a way to do it... oh wait! Now there is. 
* Bash - There are several ways to do it. Now one has to find a way to decide 
  which way to do it. 
* C Shell - The only way to do it does not work. 
* zsh - There's at least one way to do anything.

==================

I'm sorry if you're already familiar with these things. However, I found that 
I can often read funny bits and stories time and again, and still remain 
really amused.

May the Schwartz be with you!

Regards,

	Shlomi "Slimy" Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer