this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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There's at least a couple of puns going on here. You may already know some of the following.
First of all, Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late '80s. It was designed as a system administrating, text processing glue language with aspects of shell scripting,
awk,sed, thegreps and a whole host of other things.This is the first part of one of the puns. Perl was, and may still be, used as a filter in command line pipelines.
The other pun comes from the fact that perhaps the most important Perl book, Programming Perl was published by O'Reilly who generally put some sort of apparently unrelated animal on the cover of their titles. For Perl this was a camel.
Camel is, or was, a brand of cigarettes. Therefore this is the second pun. The pack of cigarettes has "Perl" where it should read "Camel" but still has the picture of a Camel, like both the book and the cigarettes.
Cigarattes, of course, often have filters on the mouth end of them, which completes the first pun. I do not know if any Camel cigarettes have these, but that's not strictly important. Some cigarettes do. Perl-branded Camels almost certainly would do.
The third (fourth?) pun, which may or may not be intended, is that some people think that programming in Perl is damaging to one's health.
Moreso mental health, but extended use can cross that hurdle easily enough.
also, using Perl is a difficult habit to break
It's only reading other people's perl that damages your health. Also your own perl if you forget writing it.
Eh it is only harmful like any spaghetti coded codebase. I had a job that we only programmed in perl.
Holy crap. Now that's the difference between Reddit and Lemmy. Thanks for the sincere response! :D
You didn't mention "20 FOSS Cigarettes." A typical pack of cigarettes is around 20, and FOSS stands for "Free (and) Open Source Software." This generally means that people can view, edit, distribute, and sometimes even sale programs they didn't themselves create. Many prominent FOSS projects use a fair bit of Perl code.
Camel cigarettes do have filters. It's been a long time since I've last seen cigarettes without filter being sold.