It was posted anonymously to Usenet on April 1, 1990,[1] and is popular among Perl programmers[citation needed] as a piece of Perl poetry.
Written in Perl 3, the poem is able to be executed as a program.
When posted to the comp.lang.perl newsgroup the poem was attributed to "a person who wishes to remain anonymous".
[1] Sharon Rauenzahn (née Hopkins), another Perl poet, has been suspected to be the author but has since denied the claim.
The remaining lines are parsed by the Perl interpreter but never actually executed.