Well things progressed and the Lemur population grew. Suddenly Lemurs were found in code other than simple todos like debug print outs and other miscellaneous code. It so happened that at one unfortunate time a simple debug message was left in the code. Somehow the customary search for Lemurs was omitted and one Lemur left the premises. Final testing prior to shipment yielded a messagebox reading “The Lemurs never dance naked at midnight!”. Not exactly the message expected by the tester.

This little incident yielded a ban on Lemurs and quite a few jokes from collegues at the expense of the developer. Nearly eight years after the incident he is still associated with Lemurs and new collegues without knowledge of the past have somehow caught on. This might however be because he had a Lemur on his desk (a gift from a girl friend (note: not girlfriend, there is a difference)).

Or it might be because he sometimes in internal applications didn’t comply with the Lemur ban. In one case an internal helper application named DBLemur (featuring pictures of Lemurs) was shipped to a customer by a helpful project manager. In his defence the project manager did remove the pictures but he did not rename the application.

And finally a recording of a flock of Lemurs somehow found it’s way inte another project managers Windows Mobile powered phone. It was triggered remotely by an SMS and had no GUI or other means to turn it off. Guess who the project manager blamed for that little stunt?

Now the Drunken Lemur has found a new job in a new town with new collegues who have no knowledge of what they are in for. This will be so much fun…

“Hello World!” in Brainfuck
++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

This “Hello World!” application makes sure you know your brain will be severly fucked up if you ever try writing large applications in Brainfuck.

Another weird programming language is APL which doesn’t even use normal ASCII characters. Nor is it interpreted as one would expect, APL is read from right to left without function or operator precedence. Yet if you look at a “Hello World” application in APL you wouldn’t know that.

“Hello World!” in APL
'Hello World!'

APL isn’t a joke, it is in use at large corporations. Why? Because of legacy applications and because it is a very powerful, expressive and concise language when working with math, science, engineering and other computation rich areas of expertise. This code (∼R∈R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R finds all prime numbers from 1 to R. To find out how I refer you to the Wikipedia link for APL supplied above.

So why did I force you to read through all that? Well, so you would appreciate the importance of this my first post and my “Hello World!” of blogging.