Perlmonks is a strange beast.
It's largely a newbie-help site,
but also contains a handful of
Things of Terrifying Beauty
I just noticed the fascinating quote above on Erudil's home node ... yet what did gifted British perl hacker robin mean by Terrifying Beauty? Asking either monk seems problematic because they've not visited us for many years now. I might add that a site with overly constraining rules (such as SO) is unlikely in the extreme to produce a terrifyingly beautiful post.
When I think of terrifying beauty, I think of:
- Beautiful awe-inspiring photographs of the cosmos, for example the Cone Nebula or a Black hole devouring a star
- Big wave surfing
I can personally vouch for the terrifying beauty of robin's Roman to Decimal Perl golf work of art, whipped up in days, led a fiercely contested golf competition for months, (accidentally) improved years later.
What about Erudil? This celebrated Canadian hacker, biker, musician and pilot seems well qualified to answer - after all, though he penned a mere thirteen nodes in eight years, every single one of them earned 100+ rep! Erudil also composed the highest rated PM node of all time, the famous camel code ... which I see has received 13 down-votes, perhaps from devout followers of prophet paco.
Miracle-worker paco is unquestionably a terrifyingly beautiful Perl monk. After writing a mere 31 words, in just one node, while spending just 64 minutes at this site, his celebrated solitary node has gone on to garner a record 868 upvotes! ... though, sadly, paco's terrifyingly beautiful question has been desecrated by antipaco vandals down-voting it 95 times ... thus demoting it to second place on the all-time PM hall of fame with a rep of 773 (+868, -95), just a whisker behind Erudil's camel code with a rep of 791 (+804, -13).
References
- The First Ten Perl Monks (contains more info on paco and the history of Perl Monks web site)
- The Top Ten Perl Obfus
- The strictures, according to Seuss by toolic
- Fish dinner by suaveant
- my @chickens by pjf
- Propose. by Falkkin - real world wedding proposal!
- 600000 nodes by liverpole - brilliantly timed node (check the node-id!)
- List of polyglot obfus (Re: Christmas poem since 1988) by ambrus
- XY Problem by jdporter
- Don't go all PerlMonks on me by bobf (maybe we should post this next time someone asks a question about parsing HTML with regexes)
- Coy (module docs written in haiku)
- cpan japh file (search for Robin Houston to see his Oulipo-inspired JAPH)
- Drunk on golf: 99 Bottles of Beer
- Dueling Flamingos: The Story of the Fonality Christmas Golf Challenge
Feel free to let us know of other hidden gems I've overlooked.
References Added Later
- Long list is long by Chuma - especially the terrifyingly beautiful analysis by marioroy after months of painstaking effort (2023)
- Re^12: Risque Romantic Rosetta Roman Race - All in One - OpenMP by marioroy - hidden in a 12-deep reply on a quirky Perl web site lies a hidden C++ easter egg, a full MCE-like and MCE::Relay-like chunking capability using C++/OpenMP, implemented in grep-count-chunk.cc. Works like MCE, including orderly output. An extra bonus, in addition to the hidden C++/OpenMP code, is linefeed counting assembler performed by SSE4 SIMD CPU instructions. Truly a terrifyingly beautiful hidden gem.
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Re: Terrifying Beauty
by VinsWorldcom (Prior) on Jan 28, 2021 at 13:18 UTC | |
by Discipulus (Canon) on Jan 28, 2021 at 19:23 UTC | |
Re: Terrifying Beauty
by zentara (Archbishop) on Jan 28, 2021 at 20:08 UTC | |
Re: Terrifying Beauty
by LanX (Saint) on Jan 29, 2021 at 17:56 UTC | |
Re: Terrifying Beauty
by talexb (Chancellor) on Jan 28, 2021 at 21:03 UTC | |
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Jan 28, 2021 at 22:55 UTC | |
by talexb (Chancellor) on Jan 29, 2021 at 16:32 UTC |