I have noticed that there seems to be some confusion on
the difference between Obfuscation and a "JAPH". Here's
my take:
An obfuscation is code that is horribly hard to read,
does everything wrong, and generally makes the viewer
ask themselves not only "What the heck does this do?"
but "How does it do that?" once the first question is
answered. Obfuscated code should not be readable at
first, or even second glance, but should require a lot
of patience and head-scratching.
A JAPH is simply a short peice of code that prints
the string "Just Another Perl Hacker". Invented by
merlyn, a JAPH is "clever" as opposed to being
obfuscated. Generally these are also one-liners,
e.g. something that can be a "sig" on a post/email.
All that being said, one of the favorite things
for an obfuscated program to do is to print "Just
Another Perl Hacker". And, of course, some JAPHs
can move beyond clever into obfuscated. So there can
be a hazy line, but in general, if it's obfuscated,
it is NOT a JAPH.
<PLUG> Of course, the best obfuscation is one that
you might thinks just prints out "Just Another Perl
Hacker", but doesn't quite :)