StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

So, one day someone at StackOverflow started a "Hidden features of" post about a famous language (I don't feel like finding out which one was first exactly), and it turned out to be so popular that other posts in the same series started popping up.

Such questions were quickly turned into community wikis, for the purposes of harvesting and organizing information coming from the best developers on the planet and voted by users of the site. There are literally hundreds of answers, sorted by votes.

Hidden Features Of

Programming Languages

Hidden features of ActionScript3 / Flex

Hidden features of ASP.NET

Hidden features of x86 assembly

Hidden features of C

Hidden features of C++

Hidden features of C#

Hidden features of ColdFusion

Hidden features of D

Hidden features of Delphi

Hidden features of Erlang

Hidden features of F#

Hidden features of Flash development, Flash language (AS2/3), and Flash IDE

Hidden features of Java

Hidden features of JavaScript

Hidden features of Haskell

Hidden features of Lisp

Hidden features of Lua

Hidden features of Objective-C

Hidden features of Perl

Hidden features of PHP

Hidden features of Python

Hidden features of R

Hidden features of Ruby

Hidden features of Ruby on Rails

Hidden features of Scala

Hidden features of Silverlight

Hidden features and Dark Corners of STL?

Hidden features of TCL/TK

Hidden features of VB.Net

Hidden features of VBA

Databases

Hidden features of MySQL

Hidden features of Oracle

Hidden features of PL/SQL

Hidden features of PostgreSQL

Hidden features of SQL Server

Mobile

Hidden features of Android development

Other

Hidden features of Bash – also see my bash cheatsheet.

Hidden features of CSS

Hidden features of Django

Hidden features of Eclipse

Hidden features of Emacs

Hidden features of Grails

Hidden features of Greasemonkey

Hidden features of HTML

Hidden features of HTTP

Hidden features of jQuery

Hidden features of mod_rewrite

Hidden features of Qt

Hidden features of RegEx

Hidden features of Spring framework

Hidden features of VHDL

Hidden features of Visual Studio (2005-2008)

Hidden features of Windows.Forms

Hidden features of WPF and XAML

Hidden features of Xpath+Xslt

I will try to maintain this list, adding new languages that join the series as I find them. Now go learn something new!

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Allow me to introduce LOLCODE – perhaps the most serious and, for some, cryptic, programming language. It is Turing-complete and uses an advanced compiler called Brainfuck (I’m still totally serious, and by the way if you’ve never heard of LOLCATS, then you’re not spending nearly enough time on the Internets. See the funny button that looks like a cross at the top right of your IE? Click it or your desktop will turn into a colorful bouquet of dildos in about 8 seconds).

Let’s look at some examples of LOLCODE, taken from Wikipedia.

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

Analysis of this complex code is beyond the scope of this article (the scientific value of which is undeniable) but I can tell you this: once you get comfortable with LOLCODE, you will forget all about C and Python. Occasionally you will still desire to use Perl because, well, Perl’s syntax is very close to LOLCODE’s.

Here’s another AWSUM example that introduces loops:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTHSAEM VAR AN 10
    VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

The program above displays numbers from 1 through 10.

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
	UPZ VAR!!1
	VISIBLE VAR
	IZ VAR BIGR THAN 10? GTFO. KTHX
KTHX
KTHXBYE

seems to be another way of writing the same thing.

Heated discussions on the subject of LOLCODE, like the introduction of a NOM NOM NOM operator, are going on every day. I, for one, am proposing renaming the KTHXBYE operator to KTHXBAI.

You can find out more about LOLCODE at the official site: http://lolcode.com.

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