>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted;
permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted,
but seems ill-advised
Tangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”). After resolving Unicode escapes, any character sequence is a valid properties file.
I've had a program where some R code stuffs some input in an URL, fires it at a server, then reads the returned CSV. No error handling or validation is attempted.
As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.
If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.
"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly
Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the
number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"
We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!
The remainder of the valid Perl programs are mostly valid due to a Perl
language feature that is not commonly present in most programming languages.
Namely, Perl has a feature called “unquoted strings”, in which a sequence
of alphanumeric characters by itself is parsed as though it were a quoted string.
As an example, Figure 5 is read by OCR as the text ME, which evaluates to the
string “ME” even though the ME isn’t quoted. This would result in a syntax
error in most other programming languages.
(To be fair to Perl, when perl is run with the -w flag to enable warnings, it does
helpfully inform the user that at some point in the future, the Perl developers
will most likely pick gggijgziifiiffif as a new reserved word:
Unquoted string "gggijgziifiiffif" may clash
with future reserved word at - line 1.)
It looks like the author used Tesseract, a traditional OCR image with lineage going back to HP flatbed scanners in the 1980s [1]
Obviously, it's been improved a lot since then - but traditional OCR is mostly about black text on white backgrounds. Or at least, the text being high-contrast relative to the rest of the document.
Light gold text on a white background, while there are black splatters? That's the sort of thing it would struggle with for sure.
i loved programming perl. both the act, and the book. i long since gave it up, but i am still awed by how it could both be completely unceremonious and absurdly ceremonious. my $self = shift; for instance.
It all depends on which OCR to use and therefore meaningless.
It is especially more meaningless since they do not establish the baseline (OCR "pass" % on random input).
Well a) it’s mostly a joke, b) to the extent it’s not a joke, it’s about how Perl accepts absurd inputs as valid programs, c) OCR paint splatters are just a funny way to get to weird arbitrary strings, of which a strangely high percentage (say, 93%) are valid Perl programs, d) so the choice of OCR doesn’t really affect the “validity” of the result, and e) the author did actually try multiple OCR settings and, when multiple OCRs produced valid Perl programs, chose “the most “interesting.””
This is more about a bad OCR than about paint splatters. They also tried multiple OCR settings until one worked. If you used more accurate OCR this would be very different.
Perl is such a ride. I wrote and maintained a nms/statistics/alerting stack around 2003-2004, ended up being around 200k LoC iirc. Just heard it is still in use at that company. My condolences to whoever has had to maintain that monster.
I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…
Figure 6 represents the string
“gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure
coincidence happens to accurately
represent the authors’ verbal reaction
upon learning that “unquoted strings”
were a feature intentionally included in
the Perl language
There is a gem in the footnote right below gggijgziifiiffif, where it says it's possible to make a perl error quine by writing this line to the right location:
Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.
I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.
I'm afraid I have to tell you you lack the soul of a poet to truly appreciate the brilliant design .
Perl is magic (like litteraly). I'm fairly sure it's one of the untold inspiration of the Harry Potter books
SIGBOVIK papers are almost always a delight
EDIT: From their 2026 publication
>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised
Popular in:
2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013
2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730
And others! Here's the full list:
93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013 - April 2024 (124 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730 - July 2021 (163 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834351 - Aug 2019 (7 comments)
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576425 - April 2019 (132 comments)
You missed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38754686 (1 comment)
(Found by clicking the ‘past’ hyperlink leads me to https://hn.algolia.com/?query=93%25%20of%20paint%20splatters..., which gives me six results)
More interestingly, gnabgib reported a different number of comments, leaking the fact that they have showdead on (and you have it off)
The reply near the top of the 2021 link with the Master Foo koan hits quite a bit differently in the age of vibecoding.
Tangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”). After resolving Unicode escapes, any character sequence is a valid properties file.
I've had a program where some R code stuffs some input in an URL, fires it at a server, then reads the returned CSV. No error handling or validation is attempted.
As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.
If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.
CSV is not a format, its a vague idea, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrqSp8m7fmk - this is a great video on how to make it fast, and how its pretty bad
The actual paper is also highly entertaining - https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf
For those who do not enjoy reading scientific papers this one is worth reading.
From the paper:
"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"
We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!
In particular, I like "Figure − 3. − 3 ." as a good little easter egg.
So they might be valid older(<v5?) PHP scripts as well?
PHP 5 had unquoted strings, and it looks like 7 did as well, but not 8.
I’m more interested in how the OCR missed that ‘Stitch & Shutter’ watermark in the third one.
It looks like the author used Tesseract, a traditional OCR image with lineage going back to HP flatbed scanners in the 1980s [1]
Obviously, it's been improved a lot since then - but traditional OCR is mostly about black text on white backgrounds. Or at least, the text being high-contrast relative to the rest of the document.
Light gold text on a white background, while there are black splatters? That's the sort of thing it would struggle with for sure.
[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Hahahhahah good catch.
i loved programming perl. both the act, and the book. i long since gave it up, but i am still awed by how it could both be completely unceremonious and absurdly ceremonious. my $self = shift; for instance.
Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.
You could kill two birds with one stone by entering them in the Obfuscated Perl Contest, were it still being held.
Every single day there's an Obfuscated Perl Contest being held somewhere on this planet....
A whole new twist on "Hackers and Painters"
It all depends on which OCR to use and therefore meaningless. It is especially more meaningless since they do not establish the baseline (OCR "pass" % on random input).
I think you’ve missed the point…
Honest question, and I’m not the person you answered to: what is the point? I sincerely don’t get it.
Well a) it’s mostly a joke, b) to the extent it’s not a joke, it’s about how Perl accepts absurd inputs as valid programs, c) OCR paint splatters are just a funny way to get to weird arbitrary strings, of which a strangely high percentage (say, 93%) are valid Perl programs, d) so the choice of OCR doesn’t really affect the “validity” of the result, and e) the author did actually try multiple OCR settings and, when multiple OCRs produced valid Perl programs, chose “the most “interesting.””
It's a joke about Perl. It's not meant to be taken seriously as a study about OCR.
This is more about a bad OCR than about paint splatters. They also tried multiple OCR settings until one worked. If you used more accurate OCR this would be very different.
More accurate OCR would recognise the images have no text
which is a valid perl program. And that one image with the watermark "stitch & shutter" ? Also valid perl.The problem is the ocr, then.
https://www.tiktok.com/@evakozy/video/7693620372213730592
I think this is the first time I’ve seen a TikTok link on HN.
Perl is such a ride. I wrote and maintained a nms/statistics/alerting stack around 2003-2004, ended up being around 200k LoC iirc. Just heard it is still in use at that company. My condolences to whoever has had to maintain that monster.
I was somewhat pleasantly surprised a few days ago when an LLM out of the blue decided to use perl, not python, for some simple scripting. There is hope in the world yet…
The modern version would be to input the image without further context into an LLM and constrain the output to valid Rust.
Figure 6 represents the string “gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure coincidence happens to accurately represent the authors’ verbal reaction upon learning that “unquoted strings” were a feature intentionally included in the Perl language
There is a gem in the footnote right below gggijgziifiiffif, where it says it's possible to make a perl error quine by writing this line to the right location:
I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202182
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576872
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/48394
> I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.
any file name? How about /1
?
I'm afraid I have to tell you you lack the soul of a poet to truly appreciate the brilliant design . Perl is magic (like litteraly). I'm fairly sure it's one of the untold inspiration of the Harry Potter books
I really dig your whimsy.
This is also a valid Perl program (I bet)
necronomicon, maybe
93% of Perl Programs are valid Paint Spatters too.
Jackson Pollock was writing perl code all along
My Stone Roses album cover is actually a bonus Perl program?
Full Fathom Five is my brain on Perl.
No, when Pollock spattered paint on a canvas, it was generally on the floor, not the Wall.
> Apparently in the brave new world of neural nets, Anything Goes™
Quite some foresight indeed!
I thought perl was finally dead enough people would stop mocking it. I'll wait til next decade.
Perl is not dead! Its popularity has merely reached dotcom level! https://entropicthoughts.com/what-killed-perl
History in reverse: first you win, then they mock you, then they ignore you
I don't need to read the article because the headline is true.
A mentor taught me that you can also roll your face on the keyboard to produce a valid Perl program. It's easy and fun to try!
A cat walking across the keyboard works too.