[1] : Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001)

swiss-army chainsaw in early unix days, a well-known technical paper
   analogized the lexical analyzer lex1 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.


see also:
perl 

Chainsaw >> C Words
Chainsaw, definition of term: Chainsaw
chainsaw_pag1.html