Swiss-Army chainsaw

Swiss-Army chainsaw


   In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the
   lexical analyzer generator lex(1) to a Swiss-army knife; this was a
   comment on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for
   a program originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for
   writing compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer
   described the {Perl} scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw",
   intending to convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly
   powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes. This had
   two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of pride,
   and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is
   highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.