Swiss-Army chainsaw
:Swiss-Army chainsaw: In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper
analogized the lexical analyzer 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.
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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