Source: https://0x2121.com/7/Lost_in_Translation/
Alt Text: (For searchability): 3 part comic, drawn in a simple style. The first, leftmost panel has one character yelling at another: "@+_$^P&%!. The second comic has them continue yelling, with their hands in an exasperated position: “$#*@F% $$#!”. In the third comic, the character who was previously yelling has their hands on their head in frustration, to which the previously silent character responds: “Sorry, I don’t speak Perl”.
Also relevant: 93% of paint splatters are valid perl programs
“Vocational skills?” I was coding for fun since I was eight. Granted, I eventually turned the poor conversion of programs from 3-2-1 Contact! magazine into a lucrative career, but when I was young, it inhabited the same space as LEGO and reading novels under the covers too late.
I primarily use perl, and while I find its syntax easy to understand, I’ll be the first to admit that its syntax and special use cases thereof does provide a way for some rather exotic symbol-garbage to be valid code.
Normal perl code is simple enough. But abnormal code does happen, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident.
I’ll share with you this gem:
Why is this program valid? I was trying to create a syntax errorIronically, the part of Perl that looks most cursing is the regular expressions, and that’s the feature that so many modern languages have borrowed from Perl directly.