A Geek-Out Confession

By Paul Kedrosky · November 4, 2005 · ·

Okay, I definitely have a not-so-suppressed geek streak. I laughed this morning in reading the following Perl one-liner regular expression joke (from use Perl):

Obligatory Doug Adams reference
by jbodoni (3320) <jbodoniNO@SPAMgmail.com> on 2005.11.04 10:10 (#44321)

> Use ($foo, $bar, $baz) = /(.)(.)(.)/ instead.

This is also known as the Eccentrica Gallumbits regex.

John

[Courtesy of Nat at O’Reilly Radar]

obAside: I had a third-year engineering Calculus professor who would have loved the above. He was a brilliant but deeply weird fellow who, among other things, delighted in the sorts of two- and three-dimensional female anatomical profiles you could create using complex differential equations. He literally named complex equations based on the person their graphical form most closely resembled.

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  3. Geek Out!
  4. The Dangers of Geek Extrapolation
  5. Open Source Up! Open Source Down!