Hacker News

And others! Here's the full list:

93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013 - April 2024 (124 comments)

93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730 - July 2021 (163 comments)

93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834351 - Aug 2019 (7 comments)

93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576425 - April 2019 (132 comments)

The reply near the top of the 2021 link with the Master Foo koan hits quite a bit differently in the age of vibecoding.

I've had a program where some R code stuffs some input in an URL, fires it at a server, then reads the returned CSV. No error handling or validation is attempted.

As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.

If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.

From the paper:

"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"

We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!

In particular, I like "Figure − 3. − 3 ." as a good little easter egg.

  The remainder of the valid Perl programs are mostly valid due to a Perl
  language feature that is not commonly present in most programming languages.
  Namely, Perl has a feature called “unquoted strings”, in which a sequence
  of alphanumeric characters by itself is parsed as though it were a quoted string.
  As an example, Figure 5 is read by OCR as the text ME, which evaluates to the
  string “ME” even though the ME isn’t quoted. This would result in a syntax
  error in most other programming languages.

  (To be fair to Perl, when perl is run with the -w flag to enable warnings, it does
  helpfully inform the user that at some point in the future, the Perl developers
  will most likely pick gggijgziifiiffif as a new reserved word:
      Unquoted string "gggijgziifiiffif" may clash
      with future reserved word at - line 1.)

For those who do not enjoy reading scientific papers this one is worth reading.

It looks like the author used Tesseract, a traditional OCR image with lineage going back to HP flatbed scanners in the 1980s [1]

Obviously, it's been improved a lot since then - but traditional OCR is mostly about black text on white backgrounds. Or at least, the text being high-contrast relative to the rest of the document.

Light gold text on a white background, while there are black splatters? That's the sort of thing it would struggle with for sure.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Hahahhahah good catch.

You could kill two birds with one stone by entering them in the Obfuscated Perl Contest, were it still being held.

More accurate OCR would recognise the images have no text

  $ touch temp.pl; perl temp.pl; echo "exit code $?"
  exit code 0

  $ echo "stitch & shutter" > temp.pl; perl temp.pl; echo "exit code $?"
  exit code 0

I think you’ve missed the point…

And Perl from 2003-2004 was especially bad. It took amazing effort to pass a file handle as a subroutine parameter. I once took a look at the Perl code behind Bugzilla, and quickly decided that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.

There is a gem in the footnote right below gggijgziifiiffif, where it says it's possible to make a perl error quine by writing this line to the right location:

    Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576872

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/48394

I'm afraid I have to tell you you lack the soul of a poet to truly appreciate the brilliant design . Perl is magic (like litteraly). I'm fairly sure it's one of the untold inspiration of the Harry Potter books

My Stone Roses album cover is actually a bonus Perl program?

No, when Pollock spattered paint on a canvas, it was generally on the floor, not the Wall.

A cat walking across the keyboard works too.

Perl is not dead! Its popularity has merely reached dotcom level! https://entropicthoughts.com/what-killed-perl

History in reverse: first you win, then they mock you, then they ignore you

I think this is the first time I’ve seen a TikTok link on HN.