93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)

zenincognito

The actual paper is also highly entertaining - https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf

sadboi_fandango

Jackson Pollock was writing perl code all along

gnabgib

Popular in: 2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013 2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730

TMWNN

https://www.tiktok.com/@evakozy/video/7693620372213730592

layer8

Tangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”). After resolving Unicode escapes, any character sequence is a valid properties file.

snitty

SIGBOVIK papers are almost always a delight EDIT: From their 2026 publication >Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised

brisket_bronson

Figure 6 represents the string “gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure coincidence happens to accurately represent the authors’ verbal reaction upon learning that “unquoted strings” were a feature intentionally included in the Perl language

criemen

> Apparently in the brave new world of neural nets, Anything Goes™ Quite some foresight indeed!

baron3dl

i loved programming perl. both the act, and the book. i long since gave it up, but i am still awed by how it could both be completely unceremonious and absurdly ceremonious. my $self = shift; for instance.

jacquesm

Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.

idlewords

A whole new twist on "Hackers and Painters"

polarsanel

93% of Perl Programs are valid Paint Spatters too.

_doctor_love

I don't need to read the article because the headline is true. A mentor taught me that you can also roll your face on the keyboard to produce a valid Perl program. It's easy and fun to try!

NoMoreNicksLeft

I thought perl was finally dead enough people would stop mocking it. I'll wait til next decade.

SoraTakai

It all depends on which OCR to use and therefore meaningless. It is especially more meaningless since they do not establish the baseline (OCR "pass" % on random input).

ideasphere

I’m more interested in how the OCR missed that ‘Stitch & Shutter’ watermark in the third one.

xenic

Perl is such a ride. I wrote and maintained a nms/statistics/alerting stack around 2003-2004, ended up being around 200k LoC iirc. Just heard it is still in use at that company. My condolences to whoever has had to maintain that monster. I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…

notorandit

The problem is the ocr, then.