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