What Happens When Nerds Get Bored
When people first started making digital computers, they were generally intended for important, professional, or any other kind of serious use. Little did they know that the very much non serious people of the world would also get a hold of it and that the internet would only further their interests. As a result, a significant portion of the internet would be occupied and used for non serious interests. But I believe that some of the best things on the internet are made by otherwise serious people who have the freedom to be very much non serious. More specifically, some people have used their coding ability to make some truly hilarious things.
The first type of non serious work that I wanted to talk about was some of the sorting algorithms that people have come up with. The one that stuck with me the most was a sorting algorithm called StalinSort. Its working principle is quite simple. It takes a list and looks at each element to see if it’s smaller than the preceding element. If the current element is bigger, nothing happens, but if it’s smaller, the current element is deleted. Technically, this means that the resulting list is always sorted with a time complexity of O(N). However, this algorithm really stretches the idea of a functional algorithm. That being said, if you wanted to use this brilliant algorithm, I’ve put a link to a github repository that contains its implementation in many different coding languages.
There’s something about people putting ridiculous amounts of effort into making something stupid that I can’t get enough of. The more effort it takes the funnier the result. Back in 1972, some students at Princeton University decided to have some “fun” and came up with the Compiler Language with No Pronounceable Acronym (INTERCAL). It was made to make fun of the coding practices at the time and to impart undue suffering on its user. Notable features of the coding languages are that it only has a few commands, namely DO and PLEASE. If you don’t use PLEASE enough, the code won’t run due to insufficient politeness. If you use too many PLEASE commands, the code won’t run due to you being overly polite. Finally all programs must finish with a GIVE UP command. Below is the code necessary to say “Hello World” in INTERCAL. If you’d like to give it a shot, I’ve linked to its official website, but keep in mind that the site tells you to abandon your sanity.
Image taken from the wikipedia site about INTERCAL
If you found INTERCAL to lack the robustness of modern code, but still wanted to use a non serious coding language, fear not, for Emojicode has your back. It’s an open-source, fully blown object oriented coding language with the following features. Some people have used this language to make some truly unreadable code like the stuff I've posted below.
- Overloading
- Overriding
- Generics
- A Compiler that informs you of unsafe code with a biohazard emoji
- And a whole host of publicly made packages
Credit to u/Grimmpie on reddit for making this code.
| Project | Link to Project |
|---|---|
| StalinSort | Link to StalinSort Github |
| INTERCAL | INTERCAL Offical Resources |
| EmojiCode | EmojiCode Official Site |