computer humor Computer humour, also known as hacker humour, is humour on the subject of computers or their users. Examples Examples of computer humour include: *"Any key", taken to mean pressing the (non-existent) "Any" key rather than any key *April Fools' Day ...

, a write-only language is a

pejorative A pejorative or slur is a word or grammatical form expressing a negative or a disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone or something. It is also used to express criticism, hostility, or disregard. Sometimes, a ...

term for a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

alleged to have syntax or semantics sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is too difficult to understand by other programmers and cannot be safely edited. Similarly, ''write-only code'' is

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be reliably modified or even comprehended by anyone with the possible exception of the author. Languages that have been derided as write-only include APL,

C/C++ The C and C++ programming languages are closely related but have many significant differences. C++ began as a fork of an early, pre-standardized C, and was designed to be mostly source-and-link compatible with C compilers of the time. Due to thi ...

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

Forth Forth or FORTH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''forth'' magazine, an Internet magazine * ''Forth'' (album), by The Verve, 2008 * ''Forth'', a 2011 album by Proto-Kaw * Radio Forth, a group of independent local radio stations in Scotla ...

, Scala and

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

, as well as

Dynamic debugging technique Dynamic Debugging Technique (DDT) is a series of debugger programs originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware, initially known as DEC Debugging Tape because it was distributed on paper tape. The name is a pun on the i ...

(DDT),

Text Editor and Corrector TECO (), short for ''Text Editor & Corrector'',"A powerful and sophisticated text editor, TECO (Text Editor and Corrector) ... is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language, that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equip ...

(TECO),

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

IGOR Pro IGOR Pro is a scientific data analysis software, numerical computing environment and programming language that runs on Windows or Mac operating systems. It is developed by WaveMetrics Inc., and was originally aimed at time series analysis, but ha ...

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH ...

, and the

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...

syntax used in various languages. Attributes that these languages have in common include a large set of operators and a syntax which encourages, or at least permits, the writing of very dense code. Some also have syntaxes which are very different from other languages, and some use different

character sets Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...

such as APL. The code below for example is

Conway's Game of Life The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further ...

as written in APL2: ⍎'⎕',∊N⍴⊂S←'←⎕←(3=T)∨M∧2=T←⊃+/(V⌽¨⊂M),(V⊖¨⊂M),(V,⌽V)⌽¨(V,V←1 -1)⊖¨⊂M'

References

{{reflist Software engineering folklore Programming language classification

See also

References