Just as companies use your resume to screen you, you can use their ad to screen them.
I hope that they ran this ad to stand out and be hip.
But just in case the people in this company are like the ad they are running, run, don't walk, the other way from these elitist snobs desperately in need of an attitude adjustment.
I would hijack the ocaml raytracer at http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/comparison..., make 3-d font primitives, and write it out. But I'm a bit underskilled and unmotivated to do anything other than propose it as the ultimate over-the-top answer to the ad.
The best snarky answer to this ad I have seen was someone who proposed running random bitstrings through sha1, looking for a hash that was a repetition of the ascii chars for hello world. The comment on the entry noted that they would not consider taking the job until the company could provide the string which would hash to a successful result.
At first I thought they were trying to be ironic. But they keep it at such a level that I think they're being serious. In which case, I'd definitely run.
Just Google for japh. There are lots of examples, easy to convert.
I'm a Perl lover which argue that with Moose and CPAN, modern Perl is incredibly good for development in many cases.
But I must say that I never understood the idea of obfuscation in Perl. If you throw out coding standards, it is like tennis without a net. :-)
Edit: If I'd done it from scratch, I'd probably have gone with the curses lib, since it was such a long time since I last used it. (The japh stuff represents at least months of creativity by people that are both smarter and crazier than I am. Don't reinvent the wheel.)
I hope that they ran this ad to stand out and be hip.
But just in case the people in this company are like the ad they are running, run, don't walk, the other way from these elitist snobs desperately in need of an attitude adjustment.
Here's my submission:
digits = [70,85,67,75,89,79,85];
for(i=0;i++;i<7){print chr(digits(i))};