Top 7 Funniest Perl Modules

By Jeff Boes

November 4, 2015

And now for something completely different ...

Programmers in general, and Perl programmers in particular, seem to have excellent, if warped, senses of humor. As a result, the CPAN library is replete with modules that have oddball names, or strange and wonderful purposes, or in some delightful cases—​both!

Let’s take a look.

I’m going to take the coward’s way out on this one right away. Go see for yourself, or don’t.

Really, anything in the Acme::* (meaning “perfect”) namespace is just programmer-comedy gold, depending on what you find amusing and what is just plain forehead-smacking stupid to you. This one allows you to transform your Perl programs (small ones work better) from this: perl print "hello world

";

to this:

Oh, that’s not just a picture of a camel. That’s actual Perl code; you can run that, and it executes in the exact same way as the original one-liner. So much more stylish. Plus, you can impress your boss/cow-orker/heroic scientist boyfriend.

This one makes the list because (a) it is just so satisfying to see perl use common::sense;

atop a Perl program, and (b) a citation of this on our company IRC chat is what planted the seed for this article.

Another is sanity.pm, as in “use sanity;”. Seems like a good approach.

Not a terribly interesting name, but it produces some head-scratching output. For instance,

* Broringers isess ailerwreakers paciouspiris dests bursonsinvading buggers companislandet despa ascen? *

I suppose you might use this to generate some Lorem ipsum-type text, or maybe temporary passwords? Dialog for your science fiction novel?

5.

Any module with the word “Moose” in it. “Moose” is a funny word.

The humor here is a bit obscure: you have to have been around for Perl4-style namespace addressing, when you would have had to load this via: perl use D'oh;

As in: perl use your qw($wits %head @tools);

Here the name is the funny bit; the module itself is all business.

Well, that seems like enough to get you started. If you find others, post them here in the comments!

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