Revenge of the WOW-ers

Remi_Woler | Jun 02, 2007 | 0 comments

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Don’t you just hate those people that post comments like ‘OMGWTFBBQ!!!111!1!!’? Not only does nobody know what it exactly means (BBQ is defined as Barbecue, Be Back Quick, Bitch Be Quiet, and a lot more), they usually just post it because they have no idea what the story is about. A normal human would not comment, or ask education if they have no idea what the story is trying to tell, but I guess for certain people this is their way of showing. Several anti-spam engines for blogs and news sites, already block ‘sequences of said characters’, to disallow people from embarrassing themselves in such a way. But if you think that’s the whole story, then buckle up. The shit just hit the fan…

A few days ago, somebody proudly showed off a small piece of source code. While this is not uncommon if you hang out in dev channels on irc, the ‘programming’ language the code was written in, was the most unbelievable language I’ve ever seen. It goes by the all saying name of ‘LOLcode’. It’s an interpreted language, based on the WoW way of combining characters – oh joy.
Take a look at this example:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

For those who don’t understand what is going on here, take a look at the Filezorz example at Lolcode.com. Every ‘language construct’ of this example is explained there (other examples are available too).

In my humble opinion, it fails all conditions that a programming language adheres to. To quote the definition: “A language that allows a programmer to write commands in a format that is more easily understood or remembered by a person, and in such a way that they can be translated into codes that the computer can understand and execute.”. More easily understood? More easily remembered? It is even more annoying than the comments! Now they have a whole language (partially completed at the time of writing) they can use to annoy normal people with! And to make it just that bit worse: they have a clothing shop running at CafePress.com to show the whole world that they use this language.
Now I wonder how many people I’ll ever meet in my life that’ll be wearing one of these shirts….

-R.W.

N.B. Interesting fact: when I moved from Drupal to WordPress and started using GeSHi for code listings, it turned out LOLCode is even recognized by GeSHi!

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