Dont dash my hopes cannonizing me with a smash,
no rash on my back for your downvoting lash.
Stash your whip! Fill the cannon with perl hash.

Dont drive me to ash if I'm not able in bash,
come back to your root slash, dont let me crash,
dont thrash me if in my cache I love The Clash.

Brashly canonize me instead, an upvoting flash,
a new sash on my shoulders would not harsh :)
[download]

L*

You gained 14 experience points.
It's the best we could do on such short notice.
Congratulations, you have been promoted to Canon!
You have 8000 points until level 21 - Chancellor.

Perl, oh Perl, you're a language so fine,
With syntax so strange, and modules so divine,
From regex to arrays, you're a tool of great power,
And with CPAN by your side, you can work by the hour.

Oh Perl, how you make my code so succinct,
With hashes and subroutines, my programs can link,
You handle data so well, from strings to files,
And with OOP, you make my code miles.

You're not just a language, but a culture so rich,
With a community of users, who all make the pitch,
Of the beauty of Perl, in all its great forms,
From CGI to Mojolicious, we weather all storms.

So here's to you Perl, our language so dear,
We'll code on and on, without any fear,
With a love for the craft, and a love for the art,
We'll make our code shine, with all of our heart.
[download]

(ai.com)

In conjunction with my final meditation, I give you the return of The Drunken Poet. Written in the "Weird Al Song Parody" style to be sung to the music of Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places". For those non-Americans, or for those who simply hate country music, forgive me... I'm from the Midwest in the USA. :-)

Friends in Perl Spaces

I blame it all on these kooks,
with their pink-hued rat books.
They've ruined my Perl love affair.

As they all crow,
I tell you this really blows.
I'm the last one to hold out and care.

And imagine my cries
as the world fell for their lies.
On my face is written the pain.

And they boasted too,
said, "ha, ha now you are screwed,"
and I'll never cease to complain!

But I've got friends in Perl spaces
where the $igils lead
and the postfix chases extra lines away.
@will_miss_it = $every_day->@*;

Yeah, I'm not big on syntax white spaces.
Their monotonous code is causing brain stasis!
Oh, I'll miss my friends in Perl Spaces!

Well, I guess I was wrong.
Python zeal is too strong.
It's past time I acknowledge the score.

I put up a good fight,
not gently in to the night,
but now I'm knocked out on the floor.

It's almost obscene
the snake cult followers gleaned,
and I can't escape it again.

They say that I
have to submit to their power,
no, I just can't win!

But I've got friends in Perl spaces
where the $igils lead
and the postfix chases extra lines away.
@will_miss_it = $every_day->@*;

Yeah, I'm not big on syntax white spaces.
Their monotonous code is causing brain stasis!
Oh, I'll miss my friends in Perl Spaces!

I'll miss my friends in Perl spaces
where the $igils lead
and the postfix chases extra lines away.
@will_miss_it = $every_day->@*;

Yeah, I'm not big on syntax white spaces
Their monotonous code is causing brain stasis
Oh, I'll miss my friends in Perl Spaces!

I'll miss my friends in Perl spaces
where the $igils lead
and the postfix chases extra lines away.
@will_miss_it = $every_day->@*;

Yeah, I'm not big on syntax white spaces
Their monotonous code is causing brain stasis
Oh, I'll miss my friends in Perl Spaces!

Yeah, I'll miss my friends in Perl Spaces!

"print" in Perl,

"Hello World!"

Congrats to you,

Although you're new,

First step's taken,

Walls are breakin'

And if you're stuck,

By any luck,

Perl Monks dear,

With advice here,

Shall through your night,

Shine their own light

Your problems solve

Perhaps dissolve!

So do not fear,

'Cause help is near!

So give your odes,

To Perl codes!

Rather underrated,

Sometimes kinda hated,

Perl is a language,

Only causing anguish,

When highly debated.

i visit this site, about once a year

nostalga burns bright, then fades into fear

same questions posted, like back in the day

chatterbox quiet, not much to say()

life is a cycle, times they move fast

but joy's found looking forward, not in the past

I'm finally content, 2 decades hence

resigned this will __END__, t'was quite the experience

like your favorite module, lastly return true

1; is so boring, end yours "with whatever you want to";

Perlimerick

perl - what are you on about?

me - you've led me so deep in the mire how are either of us to know?

use lib '.';

use soandso;

there happens to be a dirth of package soandso anywhere yet we merrily
+ whizz along
[download]

Hello Monastery - long time, no see.

As the Brothers here grow old and gray (or grey, I suppose - TMTOWTDI), we must surely be contemplating the eternal.

Leading me to wonder this morning... What's a good regular expression for your tombstone?

Maybe:

die "Normal termination" if /life$/;

Share your best idea!

I've been working on an exercise to generate the English "Twelve days of Christmas song". So far, I've come up with the following:

for(<DATA>){s/%/ing/;$_=($i++?$i-1+print"
":a)." $_";print"On the $i",(st,nd,rd)[$i-1]||th," day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me:
",$t=$_.$t}__DATA__
partridge in a pear tree.
turtle doves and
French hens,
call% birds,
golden rings,
geese a-lay%,
swans a-swimm%,
maids a-milk%,
ladies danc%,
lords a-leap%,
pipers pip%,
drummers drumm%,
[download]

That generates the following text:

My script is 343 bytes, which is better than zip and tar+gzip but worse than gzip:

-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   294 May  1 13:29 12days.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   343 Apr 30 04:00 12days.pl
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   370 May  1 13:30 12days.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john  2169 May  1 13:29 12days.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   439 May  1 13:30 12days.zip
[download]

Does anybody have a shorter solution? For simplicity's sake, I've limited the challenge to digits rather than written numbers.