The Obfuscated Perl contest is a competition for programmers of Perl which has been held annually since 1996.
Entrants to the competition aim to write "devious, inhuman, disgusting, amusing, amazing, and bizarre Perl code" [1] (http://www.tpj.com/documents/s=1286/sam03020012/)*.
The competition is divided into four categories and each entrant is allowed to submit twice to each category. The categories include;
The best four-line signature
Most powerful (limit of 1024 bytes)
Most creative (limit of 2048 bytes)
Best The Perl Journal (code which generates the words The Perl Journal, limit of 2048 bytes)
The entries are judged on aesthetics, output and incomprehensibility. One entrant per year will gain the Best of Show award.
Entrants are advised to try and demonstrate a range of Perl knowledge, whilst being humorous, surprising and deceitful. Code which purposefully crashes the judges' machines is not recommended.
Perl is widely used in finance and bioinformatics, where it is valued for rapid application development, ability to handle large data sets, and the availability of many standard and 3rd-party modules.
Perl is implemented as a core interpreter, written in C, together with a large collection of modules, written in Perl and C. The source distribution is currently 12 MB, tar'd and compressed.
Perl has been ported to over a hundred different platforms, and the mission of making the language available everywhere is commemorated in the name of the main mailing list for issues relating to perl development, "perl5-porters".
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