My two favourite Perl April Fools (taken from The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part VI): April Fools) are:

Black Perl (Larry Wall, 1990)

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 requests the formation of a new comp.lang.perl.poems newsgroup

Parrot (Simon Cozens, 2001)

Today brought the official announcement that many of us in the Perl and Python communities had been awaiting and expecting for some time now: the culmination of the year-long collaboration between Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum, and the establishment of a period of joint development between the developers of Perl and Python.

-- Simon Cozens announces Parrot, April 1, 2001

I was especially tickled by this Parrot code sample:

    # copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
    while left_angle_right_angle:
        if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
            continue_next;
        }
        print dollar_underscore;
    }
[download]

Perl April Fools Timeline

• 1990: Black Perl (Larry Wall).
• 1993: Haskerl (Will Partain).
• 1995: Pre cursor to merlyn's sh2perl (Michael Roby).
• 1997: Perl 6 released (John Macdonald).
• 1998: sh2perl (merlyn).
• 1999: sh2perl Y2K update (merlyn).
• 1999: Semi::Semicolons (schwern, ziggy, the lovely David Adler esq.).
• 1999: Java Mongers (brian_d_foy).
• 2001: use.perl.org Parrot April Fools 2001 (Simon Cozens). The Story behind the Parrot prank. Parrot on slashdot.
• 2001: Acme::Bleach (TheDamian), Acme::Buffy (Leon "acme" Brocard).
• 2001: clpm: where can I get a free perl interpreter? (Michael Farragher).
• 2002: CJAN (HFB).
• 2003: Matt Wright buys out CPAN (Jasvir Nagra).
• 2006: "Larry" replaces $ with euro for Perl 6 (spoofed to appear to be from Larry Wall).

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