swiss-army chainsaw

1 definition found

swiss-army chainsaw - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  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.