I have noticed that there seems to be some confusion on the difference between Obfuscation and a "JAPH". Here's my take:

An obfuscation is code that is horribly hard to read, does everything wrong, and generally makes the viewer ask themselves not only "What the heck does this do?" but "How does it do that?" once the first question is answered. Obfuscated code should not be readable at first, or even second glance, but should require a lot of patience and head-scratching.

A JAPH is simply a short peice of code that prints the string "Just Another Perl Hacker". Invented by merlyn, a JAPH is "clever" as opposed to being obfuscated. Generally these are also one-liners, e.g. something that can be a "sig" on a post/email.

All that being said, one of the favorite things for an obfuscated program to do is to print "Just Another Perl Hacker". And, of course, some JAPHs can move beyond clever into obfuscated. So there can be a hazy line, but in general, if it's obfuscated, it is NOT a JAPH.

<PLUG> Of course, the best obfuscation is one that you might thinks just prints out "Just Another Perl Hacker", but doesn't quite :)

In reply to JAPH and Obfuscation by turnstep

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