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.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {Perl}]