On Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 11:49:35AM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In the recent www.perl.com article "The Lighter Side of CPAN", > I was disappointed the author made no attempt to uncover the > first CPAN joke module. > > Is it possible to search search.cpan.org for all joke modules? > The earliest I could find is: > sh2perl by Randal L Schwartz > The Changes file says "Wed Mar 25 12:37:51 1998" yet the
sh2perl goes back even further than that, though not as a fully functioning program. The mythological sh2perl program was one that would email your shell program to either comp.lang.perl (back when there was *only* comp.lang.perl) or Tom Christiansen. Here is an early reference (sorry for the awful URL) http://groups.google.com/groups?th=d8f2e19fb2209276&seekm=MERLYN.95Apr4083526%40linda.teleport.com&frame=off But we can dig even further back than that. The first usenet April Fools joke I can find is the old Perl 6 announcement on March 30th, 1997 (a little early) http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7fa6afdbaf0759c2&rnum=143 This caused some trouble when the REAL Perl 6 was announced. April 1st, 1998 saw sh2perl officially announced http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8ciuouv26b.fsf%40gadget.cscaper.com Semi::Semicolons came out April 1st, 1999 and it was all downhill from there. :) But the earilest ever joke module is probably less.pm. According to Changes5.002, less.pm goes back to at least May 25, 1995 (perl5.002b1f). There's mention of a less.pod in Changes5.001, so it may go back even further. less also has the distinction of being the only joke module in the core of Perl. > Also, can anyone confirm Acme::Bleach as the culprit that > triggered the recent Acme development frenzy? Bleach and Morse definiately directly lead to Buffy, Pony, DNA etc, etc, etc... and then to the Acme:: namespace. The CPAN cabal doesn't like folks putting new modules into the top level namespace. They'd prefer "Category::Name" rather than just "Name" in the interests of trying to make sort sort of sense out of the CPAN namespace. This is a good idea, but authors of joke modules felt themselves exempt. The Silly:: namespace was thought up, but never caught on. Only a couple modules ever got into it. So nobody did anything about it because there were only a handful of really stupid modules on CPAN and they only appeared once a year. And then Damian comes along with Bleach on April 1, 2001 and in a few weeks there's about a dozen modules all doing that sort of thing. So all these new top-level modules start causing the CPAN cabal some problems. Damian and Andreas go lock themselves in a room and come up with the Acme:: namespace. Damian sent out a plea to all the authors of the joke modules in mid-May: I think we should make the top-level namespace genuinely amusing in its own right...and a source of future opportunities for humour too. To that end, I propose that we all migrate our modules to the Acme:: namespace. And thus Acme:: was born. Of course, I'm a lazy git and haven't moved my stuff there yet. Besides, Acme::Sex gives me bad imagery of exploding condoms. -- Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One Don't ask me lady, I live in beer.
