The origin of the word "obfu"

I had never heard of the word "obfu" before I came here. I strongly suspect that this "addition" to the English language originated here at Perl Monks. Note however, that the word "obfu" is not actually in any dictionary (hacker or otherwise) that I am aware of.

In Re: Acronyms. (Perlmonks-specific Acronyms), grinder states that "obfu" isn't perl-monks specific, yet it seems to be hardly used outside of PM (though that may well change in the future). At least, using google, I couldn't find any other community of any sort that uses the word "obfu" nearly as much as it's used here.

AFAICT, the first monk to use the word "obfu" is Guildenstern on May 3 2001 in SPOILER! (Guildenstern)Re: How to (ab)use substr, closely followed by damian1301 in Re: How to (ab)use substr. There followed a flurry of uses of this new word in Tribute, PM Drinking Game, Re: Line Noise (deobfuscation attempt), Re: Line Noise and many more. Update: As tye points out the first is cwest in obfu-quicky. Thanks tye (I don't know how to make supersearch search for word "obfu" only, so resorted to google on thepen and must have stuffed it up). Again, my google-fu is not great, so I welcome any corrections to this historical fact. What I'd like to know is: Who is the first Perl Monk to use the word "obfu"?

If anyone can further enlighten me on the origin of the word "obfu" I'd be most grateful (I'm preparing my next installment of the lighter side of Perl series, you see ;-).

Comment on The origin of the word "obfu"

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Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by SciDude (Friar) on Jan 16, 2005 at 03:41 UTC
obfu is certainly the shortened obfuscate: 1536, from L. obfuscatus, pp. of obfuscare "to darken," from ob "over" + fuscare "to make dark," from fuscus "dark." UPDATE: After some digging, I may have found the first ever internet related use of the term obfu; used in a post by John W. Cobb on Feb 20 1992, at 11:18 am. John's signature includes the line, -Olympic Medalist in Obfu-skating (in sci.physics.) John may now reside at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Perhaps an ORNL Monk can find him for comment? Later references are made in alt.sources - Nov 12 1993, 11:01 pm by Ury Segal. SciDude The first dog barks... all other dogs bark at the first dog.	[reply]
Re^2: The origin of the word "obfu" by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Jan 16, 2005 at 04:52 UTC
Thanks a lot! I like that 1993 question from Ury Segal: Where can I find an ftp which holds the Obfu. C context (sic) (the programs you can't read)? Close, but no cigar because he uses "Obfu." (note the trailing ".") and it's not used as a noun. I well remember after my first post here I got a couple of chatterbox messages saying "nice obfu" or "I liked your obfu". I remember thinking "what is this obfu business"? :) In summary, I think the PM-meaning of obfu is more specific than simply an abbreviation of "obfuscated". Its canonical use, as in "that was a nice obfu!", is as a noun to describe an artistic composition of obfuscated code.	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by duff (Parson) on Jan 16, 2005 at 03:26 UTC
Surely "obfu" is just short for "obfuscate" or "obfuscation". It's no great literary wonder to abbreviate :-) duff	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by dimar (Curate) on Jan 16, 2005 at 03:35 UTC
... and if you take the non-abbreviated (or rather, non-truncated) version of the word into your etymological inquiry, its usage is neither particularly new, nor particularly perlish, see e.g., International Obfuscated C Code Contest.	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Jan 16, 2005 at 04:01 UTC
It's been replied that "obfu" is short for "obfuscated", which has a long history. That's certainly the main truth. I think that "obfu" is reinforced by the popular use of "-fu" as a suffix for wisdom in adversity. After Compline, Zaxo	[reply]
Re^2: The origin of the word "obfu" by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jan 18, 2005 at 14:59 UTC
…but probably not the popular use of “ob-” as a prefix to denote “obligatory”. `:-)` Which is a pity. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re^3: The origin of the word "obfu" by wolfger (Deacon) on Jan 18, 2005 at 16:33 UTC
So obfu would be "mandatory wisdom"? Actually, I thought -fu was more "skill" than "wisdom"... -- Linux, sci-fi, and Nat Torkington, all at Penguicon 3.0 perl -e 'print(map(chr,(0x4a,0x41,0x50,0x48,0xa)))'	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: The origin of the word "obfu" by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jan 18, 2005 at 19:42 UTC
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by jZed (Prior) on Jan 16, 2005 at 04:07 UTC
The word was first used by Bruce Lee in an out-take from Enter the Dragon - "My obfu is very strong!"	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" (first PM mentions) by tye (Sage) on Jan 16, 2005 at 05:32 UTC
obfu-quicky is from 2000-06-27. Next, Re: J.A.D.N.A. links to a file called obfu.pl and passes it a parameter obfuID=2 (2000-12-27). Third is Re: Node 541 on 2001-03-07 at which point the appearances really start to pick up (Re: Re: Re: Icarus on 2001-03-23, Do the dishes on 2001-04-03, 3 more that month, 21 the next month, 24 the next, 23 the next, etc.) But before any of those, the PerlMonks source code and the HTML output by User Settings included several variables like "fp_max_obfu" probably starting around 1999-12-31 when the obfu section was being added to PerlMonks. - tye	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by Juerd (Abbot) on Jan 16, 2005 at 13:01 UTC
Let's see what Google Groups has to say about this. Oldest entry: <67064@ut-emx.uucp>, about "Obfu-skating" in a signature. (1992) Second: <2c0kat$4ja@bagel.cs.huji.ac.il>, about "Obfu. C". (1993) Clearly, back then it wasn't as common a word as it is now, but some creative people have certainly used it more than 10 years ago! Hm, strange, I thought I read the entire thread, but apparently I missed this one. Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }	[reply]
Re: The origin of the word "obfu" by kelan (Deacon) on Jan 18, 2005 at 14:02 UTC
In addition to tye's early uses, Ovid makes a reference to "obfuperl" in this post dated 2000-12-22. Dropping the name of our favorite language gives you "obfu," although I suppose you could say that is an adjective describing a certain type of Perl. Incidentally, you can use Super Search for this by putting obfu in the "Match text containing" box, and obfus in both the "Skip text containing" and "Skip titles containing" boxes, to weed out anything but the abbreviated form. This won't work to find a general string subscript (since you'd have to list a huge number of strings to exclude), but it works in this case since the sequence "obfu" is pretty rare outside of the word "obfuscate."	[reply]
Re^2: The origin of the word "obfu" by wolfger (Deacon) on Jan 18, 2005 at 14:32 UTC
you can use Super Search for this by putting obfu in the "Match text containing" box, and obfus in both the "Skip text containing" and "Skip titles containing" boxes actually, I would make the text to skip "obfusc", since I have seen people use "obfus" as the plural of "obfu" (noun, short for "obfuscated code" -- Linux, sci-fi, and Nat Torkington, all at Penguicon 3.0 perl -e 'print(map(chr,(0x4a,0x41,0x50,0x48,0xa)))'	[reply] [d/l]


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