2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Swiss-Army chainsaw
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the lexical
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analyzer generator lex (1) to a Swiss-army knife; this was a comment on the
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remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a program originally
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designed as a special-purpose code generator for writing compilers. Two
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decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the Perl scripting
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language as a Swiss-Army chainsaw , intending to convey his evaluation of
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the language as exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch
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noxious fumes. This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a
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badge of pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software
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that is highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.
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