News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by xenic on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:41AM (#50463492)
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…

Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by maxlybbert on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:32AM (#50465372)
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.