alt Hacker News93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)
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2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013
2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730
Tangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”).
The actual paper is also highly entertaining - https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf
Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.
i loved programming perl. both the act, and the book. i long since gave it up, but i am still awed by how it could both be completely unceremonious and absurdly ceremonious. my $self = shift; for instance.
A whole new twist on "Hackers and Painters"
Figure 6 represents the string “gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure coincidence happens to accurately represent the authors’ verbal reaction upon learning that “unquoted strings” were a feature intentionally included in the Perl language
Jackson Pollock was writing perl code all along
93% of Perl Programs are valid Paint Spatters too.
> Apparently in the brave new world of neural nets, Anything Goes™
Quite some foresight indeed!
SIGBOVIK papers are almost always a delight
EDIT: From their 2026 publication
>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised