The actual paper is also highly entertaining - https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf

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

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So they might be valid older(<v5?) PHP scripts as well?

PHP 5 had unquoted strings, and it looks like 7 did as well, but not 8.

They were deprecated in php 7, but did work

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!

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

Jackson Pollock was writing perl code all along

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

Full Fathom Five is my brain on Perl.

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

Popular in:

2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013

2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730

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

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)

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Yea but isn't it refreshing seeing content like this instead of ai noise?

I think the commenter was pointing out other discussions in case anyone was interested, not that it was a repost.

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

Eternal November covers a lot of new behaviours sadly.

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).

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.

CSV is not a format, its a vague idea, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrqSp8m7fmk - this is a great video on how to make it fast, and how its pretty bad

Can't agree more. I've dealt with a CSV where multiple CSVs were cat'ted together, but the originals were not in the same dialect and differed even in charset encoding. Wrote a statists based parser that decided which part of the file had to be decoded which way. Interesting technical challenge, but my god the reasons for its existence were dumb.

Falsehoods programmers believe about CSV: "Yeah, sure it's a mess and there are like, a gazillion different dialects of it, but at least once you know the dialect of a file, you can decode it"...

Claude decode this.

"How to use a billion dollar GPU cluster to parse commas, in 5 easy steps"

It would be free

My god. I love CSVs because the lack of any standardization makes them incredibly flexible, but combining CSVs is just a wild idea. What was that person thinking?

Nobody was thinking anything. A bunch of managers of a group of frenemy corporations was condemned by the governement to share date. Every company sent the data to a trusted third party. This party removed the source company, anonymangled things a bit, taped them all together, and sent the result back to everyone. Managers wanted CSV as it was easy to open in excel, and they were going to let their underlings process them manually. Then it turned out to be a few 10s of millions of records and excel couldn't yet deal with >64k rows, so IT got to deal with it.

Comma Separated Values, in which commas, separations, and values are all optional.

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

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

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

I really dig your whimsy.

necronomicon, maybe

This is also a valid Perl program (I bet)

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.

I just tried this with perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.

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

> I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.

any file name? How about /1

?

Unquoted strings are the default in shell languages, and one of the design goals of Perl was to be a more powerful replacement for shell scripts. It's not a particularly surprising feature, really.

For anything more complex than a one-off script, Perl is pretty much always written with `use strict`, which disables unquoted strings and certain other (mis)features.

> Apparently in the brave new world of neural nets, Anything Goes™

Quite some foresight indeed!

This seems to imply the possibility of steganographic paint splatter than encodes state secrets or samizdat. Maybe censors will someday demand orderly low entropy graphic designs.

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.

Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.

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

Every single day there's an Obfuscated Perl Contest being held somewhere on this planet....

A whole new twist on "Hackers and Painters"

93% of Perl Programs are valid Paint Spatters too.

I don't need to read the article because the headline is true.

A cat walking across the keyboard works too.

I thought perl was finally dead enough people would stop mocking it. I'll wait til next decade.

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

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

Perl requires more brain power than most coders have, especially nowadays.

Perl has never disappointed me. Many years ago during just 2 weeks I'd written a few clever automations and orchestrations in Perl that had lasted with 100% availability for a decade after I changed that job. Even though my superior, the self-proclaimed "top coder manager all-in-one god" despised it (and me), he was incapable of comprehending and rewriting that. It was not because I obfuscated the code, but because of what I wrote in the first sentence above. In the end he hired a consultancy and got a monstrous solution in Java. But finally it was "his".

It all depends on which OCR to use and therefore meaningless. It is especially more meaningless since they do not establish the baseline (OCR "pass" % on random input).

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Honest question, and I’m not the person you answered to: what is the point? I sincerely don’t get it.

It's a joke about Perl. It's not meant to be taken seriously as a study about OCR.

Well a) it’s mostly a joke, b) to the extent it’s not a joke, it’s about how Perl accepts absurd inputs as valid programs, c) OCR paint splatters are just a funny way to get to weird arbitrary strings, of which a strangely high percentage (say, 93%) are valid Perl programs, d) so the choice of OCR doesn’t really affect the “validity” of the result, and e) the author did actually try multiple OCR settings and, when multiple OCRs produced valid Perl programs, chose “the most “interesting.””

I’m more interested in how the OCR missed that ‘Stitch & Shutter’ watermark in the third one.

Hahahhahah good catch.

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...

Perl is such a ride. I wrote and maintained a nms/statistics/alerting stack around 2003-2004, ended up being around 200k LoC iirc. Just heard it is still in use at that company. My condolences to whoever has had to maintain that monster.

I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…

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.

The problem is the ocr, then.

This is more about a bad OCR than about paint splatters. They also tried multiple OCR settings until one worked. If you used more accurate OCR this would be very different.

More accurate OCR would recognise the images have no text

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

which is a valid perl program. And that one image with the watermark "stitch & shutter" ?

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

Also valid perl.

The modern version would be to input the image without further context into an LLM and constrain the output to valid Rust.

> fruitful procrastination

It is so rare to find proper appreciation for this creative skill.

That's with the flexible perl5 parser with a dynamic lexer, which allows everything. For my new faster perl backend perl11-p2 I am using a PEG parser, similar to raku, which needs static rules for everything. So I bet it will not accept most of the noise. But I still can run only 50% of all perl programs.

Luckily with AI, that has since increased to 100% with a small prompt ...

Now I wonder if that holds for Objective C programs, too....

perl is a write-only language ;-)

I created an interactive canvas to try it out with Tesseract and WebPerl. pretty funny that it actually works

https://vandevliet.me/create-valid-perl-by-smearing-paint-on...

Why is this OCR program evaluation paint splatter as letters?

I’m with this guy. When are we adding every possible paint splatter to Unicode so that OCR can be more accurate in situations like this?

Yeah, I feel like this is more about 90% of random strings being valid perl programs.. the paint splatters have nothing to do with it.

> To be fair to Perl, when perlis 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

what a gem of a post

Reminds me of the joke: "Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption”

This was such a fun April 1st paper. At Blekko (a search startup) everything was written in perl and it was my first deep exposure to the language. That said, with discipline you can write easily understood perl but like C you can also write deeply convoluted code. The parser though, that is a thing of incredible magnitude.