Slides from the SVPerl monthly meeting of April 1, 2021 on "April Fools Hijinks" in the Perl community. This was the second of two short presentations at the meeting.
"#AprilFools Hijinks" at SVPerl April 2021 meeting
1. presented by Ian Kluft
Silicon Valley Perl
April 1, 2021
San Jose, California (online meeting)
#AprilFools Hijinks
April Fools jokes of the Perl community
2. 2
1990: Black Perl, the first Perl April Fools joke
“It has come to my attention that there is a crying need for a place for people to express both
their emotional and technical natures simultaneously. Several people have sent me some items
which don't fit into any newsgroup. Perhaps it's because I recently posted to both
comp.lang.perl and to rec.arts.poems, but people seem to be writing poems in Perl, and they're
asking me where they should post them.”
- Larry Wall, April 1 1990
●
Joking proposal to create a Usenet newsgroup (remember them
from history?) for posting poetry which is parsable by Perl, whether
or not the program does anything useful
3. 3
1997: Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don’t Mix
●
in The Perl Journal, April 1997
●
archive at
http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/iss
ues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html
●
story about Perl scripts used by
NORAD to generate target lists
●
...and how a US Air Force
civilian programmer working
on intercontinental ballistic
missiles got himself fired
●
fortunately it’s all fiction!
●
grain of truth about subtle
side-effects that coders should
be careful about
4. 4
Reality: Perl and space rockets (1 of 2)
●
1st
successful amateur space launch had a problem:
we found the avionics & nose cone but not the
booster
●
I wrote Perl scripts using Math::Trig that generated
the latitude & longitude coordinates for the search
area for the missing booster stage of the CSXT
Space Shot rocket in 2004
– spanning from 0-100% parachute effectiveness
– 1 mile search area around that arc
●
launched May 17
●
apogee altitude 72 miles / 380,000’
●
avionics/nose cone recovered May 18
●
crashed booster recovered November 26
5. 5
Reality: Perl and space rockets (2 of 2)
●
I was working with data from the CSXT rocket’s
builders
●
One of our tracking team made a high-quality audio
recording which captured the re-entry sonic booms
well enough to tell the booster’s parachute was open
when it went subsonic
●
That narrowed our search area
●
The rocket’s builders estimated coordinates for 0% and
100% parachute effectiveness based on winds aloft
●
They asked me to compute a 1-mile radius search area
around the line
6. 6
Programming Parrot: April Fools 2001
●
Parrot was an April Fools Day
announcement by Simon Cozens
●
It claimed no less than the merger of
the Perl and Python communities
●
It was named for the Monty Python
parrot skit
7. 7
Parrot becomes reality, sort of
●
Parrot Virtual Machine, the original intermediate code of Perl 6
(before it became Raku)
●
It was named after the 2001 Parrot joke
●
It was planned to be the back-end VM for many languages
●
After years of failing to realize performance goals, Perl 6 replaced it
with MoarVM and JVM for its back-end VMs
●
Last release of Parrot was in 2016
8. 8
2001: Acme::Bleach posted to CPAN
●
CPAN module actually works
●
when run, it converts your
program to all whitespace
characters encoded to still run
the same code
●
since it’s whitespace, you can’t
read it any more
●
Oops!
9. 9
2006: Larry replaces $ with € in Perl
●
Except it was spoofed
●
Larry didn’t post it
●
https://www.nntp.perl.org/gro
up/perl.perl6.language/2006/0
4/msg24898.html
●
Supposed internationalization
“fix” for Perl
●
“That’s just a regex after all”
From: Larry Wall
Date: April 1, 2006 15:04
Subject: replacement of $
Message ID: 200604012303.40162.larry@wall.org
Recently I had time to think about the $ symbol we use in Perl.
I think Perl has been using the USD symbol for too long, and
I'm now sure that it's time to replace it. After some research I
came to the conclusion that the best fit is the euro symbol (€).
So, spread the word, Perl 6 will require you to replace all the $
in your scripts with €. That's just a regex after all...
11. 11
Perl April Fools jokes summarized at Perl Mongers in 2006
●
“The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part VI): April Fools”
https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=540609
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lists more April Fools jokes up to the point of the article in 2006