Summarizing the Perl Haiku contest

ActiveState announced the winners of their Perl haiku contest. The funny thing was that I didn't know any of the names shown, and there sure seemed like a lot of duplicates. Plus, there was a Dishonorable Mention for this entry:

Unreadable code,
Why would anyone use it?
Learn a better way.

Here's why I use it: Because I can write a program to summarize the winners on the web page in 5 minutes.

use WWW::Mechanize;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );

$mech->get( "http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Perl/Haiku/AboutPerl" );

my @names = ($mech->content =~ /Name: (.+?)<BR/igm);
my %count;
++$count{$_} for @names;
for my $key ( sort { $count{$b}<=>$count{$a} || lc $a cmp lc $b } keys
+ %count ) {
    printf "%3d: %s\n", $count{$key}, $key;
}
[download]

xoxo,
Andy

Comment on Summarizing the Perl Haiku contest Download Code

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Re: Summarizing the Perl Haiku contest by snowsmann (Scribe) on Feb 15, 2004 at 01:34 UTC
i think thats the stupidest thing, to give dishonarable mention to something like that, in fact the only reason i started to learn perl at all was because i saw the results of some of the perl obfuscation contests, and i became obsessive over learning how they did it all, i think that "unreadable" code is one of the great point of perl, though since i started on my journey towards understanding it all ive learned of the myriad uses of perl that exist, awesome post petdance	[reply]
Re: Summarizing the Perl Haiku contest by mpolo (Chaplain) on Feb 15, 2004 at 08:08 UTC
There was also an "In Perl" category with this Dishonorable Mention: `$my_args = shift; system("gcc $my_args"); print "I prefer C\n";` [download] See http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Perl/Haiku/InPerl. Update: I'm not saying that I agree with the sentiment here. I can't code C to save my life... Well maybe to save my life, but never voluntarily.	[reply] [d/l]