Cognac Hacking

blast.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $rockettop = <<'END';
     .
    / \ 
   /   \ 
END

my $rocketmid = <<'END';
  |  X  |
  |     |
END

my $rocketbot = <<'END';
 / | | | \  
END

my @girls;
for my $line (split(/\n/, `curl -s http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.female.first`)) {
    $line =~ s/\s.+//;
    push @girls, $line;
}

while (1) {
    my $girl = $girls[int(rand() * scalar(@girls))];
    my $rocket = $rockettop;
    for my $let (split(m//, $girl)) {
        my $frag = $rocketmid;
        $frag =~ s/X/$let/;
        $rocket .= $frag;
    }
    $rocket .= $rocketbot;
    my $indent = " " x int(rand() *30.0);
    my @lines = split(/\n/, $rocket);
    for my $l (@lines) {
	print "$indent$l\n";
	select undef, undef, undef, 0.05;
    }
    print "\n";
}

Nice to see you are still hacking in Perl. I've moved onto nodejs. :)

Barely. I write almost exclusively in Go these days. (that's my full-time job at Google, working on Go).

This was the first Perl I'd written in years.