It's a nasty wet snowy day here in Durango. I don't usually amuse myself with Perl outside of work, but I've been thinking that one of the first Perl scripts I ever wrote would make a fun obfu node. So I cleaned it up and started making it unreadable and all that...

...but that obfu stuff is *hard*!

And the more I struggled with my pitiful obfu, the more impressed I became with the good monks here who contribute the obfu nodes that I enjoy so much. Which led me to thinking things like this:

What editors do you use? How do you make that stuff look that good?
What's your motivation to do obfu stuff?
How much practice do you put in?

Do you have a Philosophy of Obfu? I realize that obfuscated code has been around for a long time, but much of the stuff I see here is downright elegant.

So, having punted on *my* first obfu, I wanted to see what the monks here would tell me about how and why they obfuscate code.

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