First screen, captured 2 days ago. Open the video.

93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)

What HN thinks

A beloved SIGBOVIK joke returns for its fifth lap, and Perl once again takes the hits with good grace.

Delightful joke, read the paper
Most commenters enjoy it as classic SIGBOVIK humour, pointing to footnotes, the Figure −3 easter egg and the Perl error quine.
It's really about OCR
Some argue the result depends on the OCR and lacks a baseline. Others reply that this misses the joke, since Perl accepts nearly any string, including an empty file.
Perl nostalgia and defense
Several reminisce about writing Perl and still use it. They note that unquoted strings come from its shell heritage and are turned off by `use strict`.

Consensus: Most agree the paper is a joke worth reading and that Perl's permissive parsing, like the vagueness of CSV, makes almost any input technically valid.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 1 day ago.

Points: 553
Comments: 74
Best rank: #1
Posted: 2026-11-11 by zenincognito
Category: Programming

perl sigbovik ocr esoteric-programming humor

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