It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read. It's not fair, since golf is a game, not a normal way to write code, but it still reinforces stereotypes for outsiders.

Well, "outsiders" sometimes still confuse Perl and CGI, or even web server stuff. Who cares anyway? Some C programmers like to play obfu games too. That doesn't give C a bad reputation, though.

Who cares anyway?

Managers who are selecting technologies care.

People who make their living selling corporate america the idea that Perl is a strong architecture choice care.

So, yes, it matters to me. When the discussion of "Perl vs $other_tech" comes up, and the discussion quickly (and I mean very quickly) devolves to "Oh, Perl is unreadable", and they point to JAPHs and Golf because that's google-able, my heart saddens a bit. Even if we've lost the battle for entirely the wrong reasons, we still lost.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read

or it gets the hose again.

Sorry. :-D

Here's my fun solution to the problem. It's not golfed, but is intended to show a different approach from the usual modulus operator based solutions. Instead, this uses a "generator".

use strict;
use warnings;
$\ = "\n";

my %label = (
    3 => 'fizz',
    5 => 'buzz',
);

my $end = 100;


my %queue;
$queue{0}{$_} = 1  for keys %label;

my $i = 0;
while (1)
{
    my($n) = sort { $a <=> $b } keys %queue; # "shift" the next genera
+ted number
    while ( $i < $n ) { print $i++; } # print any "non-special" number
+s before it
    last if $i++ > $end;
    my @why_its_special = sort { $a <=> $b } keys %{ delete $queue{$n}
+ };
    print @label{ @why_its_special };
    $queue{ $n + $_ }{$_} = 1 for  @why_its_special; # generate the ne
+xt succeeding number(s)
}
[download]

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read.

I like golf not only because it reveals dark corners of perl; it also reveals perl's tremendous ability to eliminate noise and produce dense expressions. Ultimately, golf tends to be noise, when shorter statement can not anymore be contrieved, but even those constructs - add a bit of air (white space) to them, a bit more verbosity, and many of them expand into beautiful, perfectly understandable nailing-downs of solutions to the problem at hand.

Compare

%hash = ();
{
    my @keys   = qw ( a, b, c);
    my @values = 1..3;
    for ( my $c = 0; $c <= $#keys; $c++ ) {
        $hash { $keys [$c] } = $values [ $c ];
    }
}
[download]

which is a common idiom in many languages, to

@hash { qw (a, b, c) } = 1..3;
[download]

of which the latter is the golfed code version, useable in production code, and you must admit that perl to some extent is golf - well, compared to Java anyways ;-)

Any language is "obscure and hard to read" for those that don't venture into it; and no matter whether that "obscure and hard to read" judgement is uttered as a pretext to not do so, or as a disinformed dismissive, it is just prejudice - and there being perl golf or not doesn't change that in the least.

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}