Slides from the SVPerl monthly meeting of April 1, 2021 on "April Fools Hijinks" in the Perl community. This was the second of two short presentations at the meeting.

1. presented by Ian Kluft
Silicon Valley Perl
April 1, 2021
San Jose, California (online meeting)
#AprilFools Hijinks
April Fools jokes of the Perl community

2. 2
1990: Black Perl, the first Perl April Fools joke
“It has come to my attention that there is a crying need for a place for people to express both
their emotional and technical natures simultaneously. Several people have sent me some items
which don't fit into any newsgroup. Perhaps it's because I recently posted to both
comp.lang.perl and to rec.arts.poems, but people seem to be writing poems in Perl, and they're
asking me where they should post them.”
- Larry Wall, April 1 1990
●
Joking proposal to create a Usenet newsgroup (remember them
from history?) for posting poetry which is parsable by Perl, whether
or not the program does anything useful

3. 3
1997: Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don’t Mix
●
in The Perl Journal, April 1997
●
archive at
http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/iss
ues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html
●
story about Perl scripts used by
NORAD to generate target lists
●
...and how a US Air Force
civilian programmer working
on intercontinental ballistic
missiles got himself fired
●
fortunately it’s all fiction!
●
grain of truth about subtle
side-effects that coders should
be careful about

4. 4
Reality: Perl and space rockets (1 of 2)
●
1st
successful amateur space launch had a problem:
we found the avionics & nose cone but not the
booster
●
I wrote Perl scripts using Math::Trig that generated
the latitude & longitude coordinates for the search
area for the missing booster stage of the CSXT
Space Shot rocket in 2004
– spanning from 0-100% parachute effectiveness
– 1 mile search area around that arc
●
launched May 17
●
apogee altitude 72 miles / 380,000’
●
avionics/nose cone recovered May 18
●
crashed booster recovered November 26

5. 5
Reality: Perl and space rockets (2 of 2)
●
I was working with data from the CSXT rocket’s
builders
●
One of our tracking team made a high-quality audio
recording which captured the re-entry sonic booms
well enough to tell the booster’s parachute was open
when it went subsonic
●
That narrowed our search area
●
The rocket’s builders estimated coordinates for 0% and
100% parachute effectiveness based on winds aloft
●
They asked me to compute a 1-mile radius search area
around the line

6. 6
Programming Parrot: April Fools 2001
●
Parrot was an April Fools Day
announcement by Simon Cozens
●
It claimed no less than the merger of
the Perl and Python communities
●
It was named for the Monty Python
parrot skit

7. 7
Parrot becomes reality, sort of
●
Parrot Virtual Machine, the original intermediate code of Perl 6
(before it became Raku)
●
It was named after the 2001 Parrot joke
●
It was planned to be the back-end VM for many languages
●
After years of failing to realize performance goals, Perl 6 replaced it
with MoarVM and JVM for its back-end VMs
●
Last release of Parrot was in 2016

8. 8
2001: Acme::Bleach posted to CPAN
●
CPAN module actually works
●
when run, it converts your
program to all whitespace
characters encoded to still run
the same code
●
since it’s whitespace, you can’t
read it any more
●
Oops!

9. 9
2006: Larry replaces $ with € in Perl
●
Except it was spoofed
●
Larry didn’t post it
●
https://www.nntp.perl.org/gro
up/perl.perl6.language/2006/0
4/msg24898.html
●
Supposed internationalization
“fix” for Perl
●
“That’s just a regex after all”
From: Larry Wall
Date: April 1, 2006 15:04
Subject: replacement of $
Message ID: 200604012303.40162.larry@wall.org
Recently I had time to think about the $ symbol we use in Perl.
I think Perl has been using the USD symbol for too long, and
I'm now sure that it's time to replace it. After some research I
came to the conclusion that the best fit is the euro symbol (€).
So, spread the word, Perl 6 will require you to replace all the $
in your scripts with €. That's just a regex after all...

10. 10
Perl in XKCD comics
#1171 Perl Problems
#208 Regular Expressions

11. 11
Perl April Fools jokes summarized at Perl Mongers in 2006
●
“The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part VI): April Fools”
https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=540609
●
lists more April Fools jokes up to the point of the article in 2006

12. 12
Perl Community #AprilFools Hijinks
Discussion:
What Perl-related April Fools jokes do you remember?