[Mastering-perl] Mastering Perl tag line contest

[Vonnahme, Nathan]

> Swiss Army Chainsaw?



>From http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/Swiss-Army-chainsaw.html :


 	In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the
lexical analyzer generator lex(1) to a Swiss-army knife; this was a
comment on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a
program originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for
writing compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer
described the Perl scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw",
intending to convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly
powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes. This had
two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of pride, and
(2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is highly
versatile but distressingly inelegant.



When I first heard the term I thought it all positive -- "useful for any
job" as well as "very powerful", and didn't catch the "ugly and noisy"
part.  But anyway, _Mastering Perl_ is about making our favorite
brute-force instrument a little more refined...