I am giving my first Perl talk to Sydney.pm in a week or so and would like to start it with an introduction to the lighter side of Perl culture. I started by trying to identify the categories. Here is what I have come up with so far. Being a Perl late-comer, I am not certain of the accuracy of what follows. Corrections and additions welcome. Some of this info. was got from history.perl.org, some from various emails to perl mailing lists. 1) JAPH R.Schwartz (1988). 2) .sig in Perl A natural extension of JAPHs. 3) Perl Poetry L.Wall (1990). 4) Haiku Popularized by D.Conway(1998) in Coy module, but were they popular before this? 5) Perl Golf L.Wall/R.Schwartz(1990) -- the playing. For example in this post Larry plays golf with himself but mentions Randal so I assume he also played around this time: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991Apr29.072206.5621%40jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov G.Bacon(1999) -- coined the term 6) Obfus Derived from JAPHS (?) Who did the first one? 7) Joke Modules sh2perl (R.Schwartz,1998) Semi::semicolons (M.Schwern,1999) Acme namespace (D.Conway,2001 via Acme::Bleach) use less (Perl core -- who is responsible?) I heard rumours that sh2perl goes back to 1990 with a version that would email the shell script to tchrist and ask him to write a Perl version. I.Phillipps did a similar trick with a Perl program/function generator around 1990 that sent a request to Perl newsgroup. 8) Sayings/Quotes Many from L.Wall from C source code comments etc. Two interesting recent ones: "use strict is gay" (BK,P.Cawley,D.Cross,R.Clamp) "schwern is my bitch" (Belfast.pm (?)) I know history of the former but what does it mean: "schwern is my bitch" ?? 9) April Fools 1990: "Black Perl" -- L.Wall 1998: sh2perl -- R.Schwartz 1999: Semi::semicolons -- M.Schwern 1999: "Java Mongers" -- ?? 2001: parrot -- S.Cozens 2001: Acme::Buffy -- L.Brocard /-\ http://careers.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Careers - 1,000's of jobs waiting online for you!