Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

If you are a programmer, you, by definition, belong to the elite [awesome] human breed called geeks. If you know how to code in Python or Ruby, you might even think you’re pretty hot shit. But none of that compares in hotshitness to what you are about to learn.

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.