93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

A humorous 2019 research paper presented at SIGBOVIK (an April Fools' academic conference) found that 93% of random paint splatters, when processed through optical character recognition software, parse as valid Perl programs. The author analyzed 100 paint-splatter images and identified only 7 examples that did not constitute valid Perl code, demonstrating the surprisingly permissive syntax of the Perl programming language.