Perlmonks is a strange beast.
It's largely a newbie-help site,
but also contains a handful of
Things of Terrifying Beauty

-- Erudil quoting robin

I just noticed the fascinating quote above on Erudil's home node ... yet what did gifted British perl hacker robin mean by Terrifying Beauty? Asking either monk seems problematic because they've not visited us for many years now. I might add that a site with overly constraining rules (such as SO) is unlikely in the extreme to produce a terrifyingly beautiful post.

When I think of terrifying beauty, I think of:

What do you think of? And what is terrifyingly beautiful Perl?

I can personally vouch for the terrifying beauty of robin's Roman to Decimal Perl golf work of art, whipped up in days, led a fiercely contested golf competition for months, (accidentally) improved years later.

What about Erudil? This celebrated Canadian hacker, biker, musician and pilot seems well qualified to answer - after all, though he penned a mere thirteen nodes in eight years, every single one of them earned 100+ rep! Erudil also composed the highest rated PM node of all time, the famous camel code ... which I see has received 13 down-votes, perhaps from devout followers of prophet paco.

Miracle-worker paco is unquestionably a terrifyingly beautiful Perl monk. After writing a mere 31 words, in just one node, while spending just 64 minutes at this site, his celebrated solitary node has gone on to garner a record 868 upvotes! ... though, sadly, paco's terrifyingly beautiful question has been desecrated by antipaco vandals down-voting it 95 times ... thus demoting it to second place on the all-time PM hall of fame with a rep of 773 (+868, -95), just a whisker behind Erudil's camel code with a rep of 791 (+804, -13).

References

Feel free to let us know of other hidden gems I've overlooked.

References Added Later

In reply to Terrifying Beauty by eyepopslikeamosquito

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