"It's Still Hackin' Perl to Me"
another bad parody by Deanna Rubin
with apologies to Billy Joel


What's the matter with the code I'm writing?
"Can't you tell that your memory leaks?"
Maybe I should write some brand new functions?
"Just go join in the rank of geeks."
Where have you been learning your stuff, honey?
If you grok perl you can make a lot of money
Everybody's talkin' bout the new stuff
Funny, but it's still hackin' perl to me

What's the matter with the scripts I'm running?
"Can't you tell that they're really forked?"
Should I try to make performance stunning?
"Don't you feel like a real big dork?"
Nowadays you can't give in to desperation
You have to write a really super-fast application
Match strings, print things, send pings, token rings,
It's still hackin' perl to me

Oh, it doesn't matter what they say in man pages
'Cause they scroll too fast across the screen
There's a new way to parse
But it's a pain in the arse
Hey, we gotta keep our comments clean
But say what they really mean...

How about a regular expression
To extract all the text you want?
You could read it into one big structure
And preprocess it all in front
Don't waste your time on parsing new sets of data
You'd get more mileage from a language like Ada
Back slash, dot splash, at hash, script crash
It's still hackin' perl to me

What is up with all this crap I'm seeing?
"You forgot a colon on some line..."
Should I use dash double-u to track it?
"It's a better option than to whine!"
Consult the llama with these dumb syntax questions
Or use "man perlfunc" if you've got a good connection
It's the Next phase, fast Crays, long days, anyways
It's still hackin' perl to me.

Everybody's talkin' bout the new stuff
Funny, but it's still hackin' perl to me...