perl zealots
Okay – I’ve always known that there are some rather intense perl zealots out there. Only today did I realize how fanatical they can become.
This guy made a linux distro in which the only compiled piece of code is the linux kernel itself. The rest of the OS is written in perl. I don’t quite know what to say in response to this except…”Wow”.
Perl itself is compiled as well.. :-) Anyway, it seems that a lot of these tools were already made, he just removed a lot of the useful ones that weren’t. Unfortunately, there’s no practical use to this — why reinvent the wheel (and have it run slower)? To this, I say (as you did)… wow.
But I still love Perl. :-)
My only comment was going to be: why?
Because.
The same reason they like to have contests like this.
I give them kudos for use of the word “Obfuscated” in the title of their contest… that is just a great, under-utilized word.
Ahh yes – the Obfuscated Perl contest. Great stuff – I’ve been following it for several years. It’s fun do download the winning entries and run them. A few years ago, a guy made a graphical driving game that was just amazing, being that the code was 1) very short and 2) Completely unintelligible.
When I first heard of these contests in college, I’ve always wanted to submit an entry that takes a program as its input, and obfuscates the code… An obfuscated obfuscater… heh