David Morgan-Mar - Esoterica

Esoterica

Morgan-Mar has created a number of esoteric programming languages (including Chef and Piet) and algorithms. Some of them are full Turing-complete languages while others are simple jokes, often based upon the idea of how a given group (e.g., chefs, orangutans, or necromancers) would be expected to program.

It is a mark of Morgan-Mar's humor that his algorithms often reflect the practices of or misconceptions about the computing industry, for instance "LenPEG", an image-compression algorithm, is designed such that if it is given the standard Lenna image it produces an output file of 1 byte, otherwise implementing a standard JPEG, GIF or PNG compression, therefore beating these in benchmark tests. His intelligent sort algorithm (a parody of intelligent design), which suggests that any sufficiently complicated list is already sorted according to the whims of a sorter implying any further sorting is unnecessary, was referenced in the "Feedback" section of New Scientist.