Definition of Swiss-Army chainsaw
Swiss-Army chainsaw 
noun
- software that is highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.
More words meaning: computer slang
origin
- In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the lexical analyzer generator "lex" 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 programming 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.
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