In 1972, Princeton students Don Woods and James Lyon created INTERCAL — the “Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym” — explicitly as a parody of every design decision in contemporary programming languages. It features operators called PLEASE, IGNORE, and FORGET; requires programmers to use PLEASE often enough to satisfy the compiler’s politeness checker, but not so often as to appear sycophantic; and produces compile errors if you’re rude. Input and output involve Roman numerals and a lookup table. The language was essentially lost for 17 years until a copy surfaced in 1990 and someone, inexplicably, ported it to C. It now has an active open-source implementation. There is no satisfying explanation for this.
