Programming Perl [Chapter 8] 8.6 Perl Poetry

8.6 Perl Poetry

The forgery in the attendant sidebar appeared on Usenet on April Fool's Day, 1990. It is presented here without comment, merely to show how disgusting the metaphors of a typical programming language really are. So much for anything resembling literary value. Larry is particularly relieved that "Black Perl", originally written for Perl 3, no longer parses under Perl 5.

Article 970 of comp.lang.perl:
Path: jpl-devvax!pl-dexxav!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-dexxav.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: news.groups,rec.arts.poems,comp.lang.perl
Subject: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.lang.perl.poems
Message-ID: <0401@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 1 Apr 90 00:00:00 GMT
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NSAS.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Prepulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 61
It has come to my attention that there is a crying need for a place for people to express both their emotional
and technical natures simultaneously. Several people have sent me some items which don't fit into any
newsgroup. Perhaps it's because I recently posted to both comp.lang.perl and to rec.arts.poems, but people
seem to be writing poems in Perl, and they're asking me where they should post them. Here is a sampling:
From a graduate student (in finals week), the following haiku:

study, write, study,
do review (each word) if time.
close book. sleep? what's that?

And someone writing from Fort Lauderdale writes:

sleep, close together,
sort of sin each spring & wait;
50% die

A person who wishes to remain anonymous wrote the following example of "Black Perl". (The Pearl poet
would have been shocked, no doubt.)

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit;  wait until time.
  open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
  reverse its length, write again;
  kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
     unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
  kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
  values aside, each one;
    die sheep! die to reverse the system
    you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
  kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
  wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
  do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
  exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
  select (quickly) & warn your next victim;
AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.
  wait, wait until time;
  wait until next year, next decade;
    sleep, sleep, die yourself,
    die at last

I tried that, and it actually parses in Perl. It doesn't appear to do anything useful, however. I think I'm glad,
actually... I hereby propose the creation of comp.lang.perl.poems as a place for such items, so we don't clutter
the perl or poems newsgroups with things that may be of interest to neither. Or, alternately, we should
create rec.arts.poems.perl for items such as those above which merely parse, and don't do anything useful.
(There is precedent in rec.arts.poems, after all.) Then also create comp.lang.perl.poems for poems that
actually do something, such as this haiku of my own:

print STDOUT q
Just another Perl hacker,
unless $spring

Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov

Larry's, er, corpus has fortunately been overshadowed by that of the reigning Perl Poet, Sharon Hopkins. She has written quite a few Perl poems, as well as a paper on Perl poetry that she presented at the Usenix Winter 1992 Technical Conference, entitled "Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language". (The paper is available as misc/poetry.ps on CPAN.) Besides being the most prolific Perl poet, Sharon is also the most widely published, having had the following poem published in both the Economist and the Guardian:

#!/usr/bin/perl
APPEAL:
listen (please, please);
  open yourself, wide;
  join (you, me),
  connect (us,together),
tell me.
do something if distressed;
  @dawn, dance;
  @evening, sing;
  read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
  study if able;
  write me if-you-please;
sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);
    do*not*die (like this)
    if sin abounds;
keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
  do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.
        accept (yourself, changes),
        bind (grief, despair);
  require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
select (always), length(of-days)
# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995

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