>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted;
permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted,
but seems ill-advised
More interestingly, gnabgib reported a different number of comments, leaking the fact that they have showdead on (and you have it off)
adamrezich 11 hours ago [-]
The reply near the top of the 2021 link with the Master Foo koan hits quite a bit differently in the age of vibecoding.
layer8 11 hours ago [-]
Tangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”). After resolving Unicode escapes, any character sequence is a valid properties file.
hyperman1 4 hours ago [-]
I've had a program where some R code stuffs some input in an URL, fires it at a server, then reads the returned CSV. No error handling or validation is attempted.
As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.
If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.
Can't agree more. I've dealt with a CSV where multiple CSVs were cat'ted together, but the originals were not in the same dialect and differed even in charset encoding. Wrote a statistics based parser that decided which part of the file had to be decoded which way. Interesting technical challenge, but my god the reasons for its existence were dumb.
"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly
Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the
number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"
We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!
Amorymeltzer 11 hours ago [-]
In particular, I like "Figure − 3. − 3 ." as a good little easter egg.
comboy 2 hours ago [-]
For those who do not enjoy reading scientific papers this one is worth reading.
0xbadcafebee 10 hours ago [-]
The remainder of the valid Perl programs are mostly valid due to a Perl
language feature that is not commonly present in most programming languages.
Namely, Perl has a feature called “unquoted strings”, in which a sequence
of alphanumeric characters by itself is parsed as though it were a quoted string.
As an example, Figure 5 is read by OCR as the text ME, which evaluates to the
string “ME” even though the ME isn’t quoted. This would result in a syntax
error in most other programming languages.
(To be fair to Perl, when perl is run with the -w flag to enable warnings, it does
helpfully inform the user that at some point in the future, the Perl developers
will most likely pick gggijgziifiiffif as a new reserved word:
Unquoted string "gggijgziifiiffif" may clash
with future reserved word at - line 1.)
xhrpost 9 hours ago [-]
So they might be valid older(<v5?) PHP scripts as well?
Izkata 4 hours ago [-]
PHP 5 had unquoted strings, and it looks like 7 did as well, but not 8.
42 minutes ago [-]
rurban 31 minutes ago [-]
That's with the flexible perl5 parser with a dynamic lexer, which allows everything. For my new faster perl backend perl11-p2 I am using a PEG parser, similar to raku, which needs static rules for everything. So I bet it will not accept most of the noise. But I still can run only 50% of all perl programs.
ideasphere 7 hours ago [-]
I’m more interested in how the OCR missed that ‘Stitch & Shutter’ watermark in the third one.
michaelt 2 hours ago [-]
It looks like the author used Tesseract, a traditional OCR image with lineage going back to HP flatbed scanners in the 1980s [1]
Obviously, it's been improved a lot since then - but traditional OCR is mostly about black text on white backgrounds. Or at least, the text being high-contrast relative to the rest of the document.
Light gold text on a white background, while there are black splatters? That's the sort of thing it would struggle with for sure.
It is so rare to find proper appreciation for this creative skill.
baron3dl 10 hours ago [-]
i loved programming perl. both the act, and the book. i long since gave it up, but i am still awed by how it could both be completely unceremonious and absurdly ceremonious. my $self = shift; for instance.
idlewords 9 hours ago [-]
A whole new twist on "Hackers and Painters"
jacquesm 9 hours ago [-]
Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.
kmoser 8 hours ago [-]
You could kill two birds with one stone by entering them in the Obfuscated Perl Contest, were it still being held.
mlmonkey 7 hours ago [-]
Every single day there's an Obfuscated Perl Contest being held somewhere on this planet....
notorandit 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is the ocr, then.
SoraTakai 7 hours ago [-]
It all depends on which OCR to use and therefore meaningless.
It is especially more meaningless since they do not establish the baseline (OCR "pass" % on random input).
ashton314 7 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve missed the point…
ckdot 6 hours ago [-]
Honest question, and I’m not the person you answered to: what is the point? I sincerely don’t get it.
asgraham 5 hours ago [-]
Well a) it’s mostly a joke, b) to the extent it’s not a joke, it’s about how Perl accepts absurd inputs as valid programs, c) OCR paint splatters are just a funny way to get to weird arbitrary strings, of which a strangely high percentage (say, 93%) are valid Perl programs, d) so the choice of OCR doesn’t really affect the “validity” of the result, and e) the author did actually try multiple OCR settings and, when multiple OCRs produced valid Perl programs, chose “the most “interesting.””
odo1242 5 hours ago [-]
It's a joke about Perl. It's not meant to be taken seriously as a study about OCR.
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
This is more about a bad OCR than about paint splatters. They also tried multiple OCR settings until one worked. If you used more accurate OCR this would be very different.
michaelt 2 hours ago [-]
More accurate OCR would recognise the images have no text
Perl is such a ride. I wrote and maintained a nms/statistics/alerting stack around 2003-2004, ended up being around 200k LoC iirc. Just heard it is still in use at that company. My condolences to whoever has had to maintain that monster.
I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…
brisket_bronson 10 hours ago [-]
Figure 6 represents the string
“gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure
coincidence happens to accurately
represent the authors’ verbal reaction
upon learning that “unquoted strings”
were a feature intentionally included in
the Perl language
omoikane 7 hours ago [-]
There is a gem in the footnote right below gggijgziifiiffif, where it says it's possible to make a perl error quine by writing this line to the right location:
Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.
I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.
> I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.
any file name? How about /1
?
lta 10 hours ago [-]
I'm afraid I have to tell you you lack the soul of a poet to truly appreciate the brilliant design .
Perl is magic (like litteraly). I'm fairly sure it's one of the untold inspiration of the Harry Potter books
hluska 10 hours ago [-]
I really dig your whimsy.
tomaskafka 10 hours ago [-]
This is also a valid Perl program (I bet)
bitwize 10 hours ago [-]
necronomicon, maybe
spwa4 8 minutes ago [-]
Luckily with AI, that has since increased to 100% with a small prompt ...
polarsanel 9 hours ago [-]
93% of Perl Programs are valid Paint Spatters too.
silvandeboer 3 hours ago [-]
The modern version would be to input the image without further context into an LLM and constrain the output to valid Rust.
sadboi_fandango 11 hours ago [-]
Jackson Pollock was writing perl code all along
HeckFeck 11 hours ago [-]
My Stone Roses album cover is actually a bonus Perl program?
don-code 8 hours ago [-]
Full Fathom Five is my brain on Perl.
kmoser 8 hours ago [-]
No, when Pollock spattered paint on a canvas, it was generally on the floor, not the Wall.
criemen 10 hours ago [-]
> Apparently in the brave new world of neural nets, Anything Goes™
Quite some foresight indeed!
10 hours ago [-]
_doctor_love 7 hours ago [-]
I don't need to read the article because the headline is true.
A mentor taught me that you can also roll your face on the keyboard to produce a valid Perl program. It's easy and fun to try!
lisper 6 hours ago [-]
A cat walking across the keyboard works too.
NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago [-]
I thought perl was finally dead enough people would stop mocking it. I'll wait til next decade.
EDIT: From their 2026 publication
>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised
2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013
2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730
93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013 - April 2024 (124 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730 - July 2021 (163 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834351 - Aug 2019 (7 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576425 - April 2019 (132 comments)
(Found by clicking the ‘past’ hyperlink leads me to https://hn.algolia.com/?query=93%25%20of%20paint%20splatters..., which gives me six results)
More interestingly, gnabgib reported a different number of comments, leaking the fact that they have showdead on (and you have it off)
As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.
If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.
"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"
We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!
Obviously, it's been improved a lot since then - but traditional OCR is mostly about black text on white backgrounds. Or at least, the text being high-contrast relative to the rest of the document.
Light gold text on a white background, while there are black splatters? That's the sort of thing it would struggle with for sure.
[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
It is so rare to find proper appreciation for this creative skill.
I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202182
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576872
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/48394
any file name? How about /1
?
Quite some foresight indeed!
A mentor taught me that you can also roll your face on the keyboard to produce a valid Perl program. It's easy and fun to try!