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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Programmer Humor
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May I acquaint you with the Evil Mangler, historically used by GHC to compile Haskell via C. It would go through the assembly gcc generates and rearrange whole blocks and deletes instructions, such as function prologues and epilogues.
Holy shit. This thing sounds insanely awesome, but also quintessentially Perl. Like, the perfect holotype for Perl.
And, damn, but I'm impressed. I've seen code that I admired; elegant, inspired, wise code... but the Evil Mangler leaves me in awe.
There is a very strange, and maybe unexpected, cultural overlap between Perl and Haskell: It's definitely possible to produce write-only Haskell, and once you get good enough writing Haskell it becomes very inviting to do so. It's generally going to be a tiny bit more robust, probably a bit slower, and do dirty things with syb regexen could never dream of. While Perl will rip a DFA through a html file while hoping for the best, Haskell will respect the tree structure and then bend it into eldritch knots, leaving you with a file that's like 50 lines of parser combinators ("it works on my files") and then five lines of completely inscrutable magic doing the actual processing.