CruelAndUnusualLanguages

The kind of languages that were deliberately created to hurt the head of the programmer. 'Classics' of the form include Intercal, Befunge and Brainfuck.

For more, check out http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~sefrin/badlangs/badlangs.html, but remember some of these things have 'real' compilers.

And then there's Perl. As far as I can tell, Perl is the language of choice for implementing CruelAndUnusualLanguages, and, whilst good Perl programmers can (and do) write clear, intention revealing code that's easy to maintain there's no pretending that you can do some awful/funny things with it.

Check out:

• http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Lingua-Romana-Perligata -- Lets you code in Latin
• http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Acme-Bleach -- *really* cleans your code
• http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Quantum-Superpositions -- Has to be seen to be believed. And if you ever get the chance to hear Damian lecture on this grab it with both hands. You too will be giggling whenever you hear the phrase 'in constant time'
• http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Coy -- Turns your errors / into haiku enhancing / your mental balance
• http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Symbol-Approx-Sub --Corrects typos by guessing which sub/method you *meant* to call.

Actually, there's a semi-serious side to many of these for Perl programmers, in that some of the techniques used to make these jokes work can be used to do useful stuff too.³host³³date³November 7, 2001³agent³Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010914³CruelAndUnusualLanguages