More Hacker Poetry: Passions Proclaimed in Perl

I ran into Unix patch command creator Larry Wall's stunning poem Black Perl poem in a Boing Boing post last year.  It was only recently, however, that I discovered the Perl-based poetry of Sharon Hopkins and her fascinating 2002 paper "Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language".  Sharon's paper contains and references numerous poems written as runnable code in the Perl programming language.

Larry Wall's Black Perl:

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.

    open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);

write it, print the hex while each watches,

    reverse its length, write again;

    kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.

        unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),

sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");

    kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,

    values aside, each one;

        die sheep! die to reverse the system

        you accept (reject, respect);

next step,

    kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,

    wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";

    do it ("as they say").

do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).

return last victim; package body;

    exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,

    select (quickly) & warn your next victim;

AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.

    wait, wait until time;

    wait until next year, next decade;

        sleep, sleep, die yourself,

        die at last