I’ve heard of Pythonistas and Rustaceans. What are some of the other names given to devs writing in, for example, PHP or C++. Appreciate any answers - both serious and joking.

  • Perl:

    Just another Perl hacker, (sic)

    This was coined by Randall Schwartz on Usenet a very long time ago. The comma has become part of it despite it originally being necessary for the English sentence it first appeared in.

    Part of being a Perl aficionado is to write a japh script, that is a Perl script that prints out the above line, comma and all. The more obfuscated it is, the better. Another part is to not write code like that in production, at least not without comments explained what the heck the symbol soup is doing.

    “(Perl) Wizard” has been applied to those who are notably proficient, thought that’s usually a title bestowed by others.

    The self-deprecating alternative is “funny character(s)” for both the symbols that appear all over Perl code as well as those who use them (I think this one was coined by Perl creator Larry Wall himself).