One of the first "official" uses I had for Perl was inpsired by US government bureaucracy. A few years ago, someone at the hindquarters of a government agency to which I had contracted had decided that they would measure productivity by how many lines of code we wrote. Brilliant! (Include clinking of Guinness glasses here.) After lobbying, my boss pointed out that often reducing lines of code was more efficient, so we could get credit for that, too. So I wrote a Perl script that, as part of a check-in/check-out set of shell scripts, expanded C/C++ code to multiple lines, or collapsed it to one line (barring HERE documents), or added GNDN code (sleeps, useless for loops, "if (1 == 0)" blocks, etc).

Naturally, I wasn't the only one to have thought of this; my boss had as well and we got together to combine all our tricks of the trade. We were suddenly producing more code than the other 200 people in the lab combined because we were expanding and compressing code like a g(un)?zip command gone rogue. When the folks at hindquarters discovered this, and why, they abandoned the idea.

In some ways, it was my proudest moment: I actually got US government bureaucrats to admit, albeit implicitly, that they had made a mistake because they didn't understand something. It was tantamount to getting a marketing executive to admit he doesn't know how to do anything but BS and play golf.