jenk

On INTERCAL:

This ridiculous esoteric programming language was designed as an unpronounceable satire of FOTRAN and COBOL (yes, it's old). Everything about the language is absurd. From the form of the manual, which contains a "tonsil," as explained in this footnote:

"4) Since all other reference manuals have Appendices, it was decided that the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ."

The language also uses modifiers such as "PLEASE," which if not used frequently enough is rejected by the compiler as insufficiently polite, and if used too much is rejected for being excessively polite. More frustrating still, was the fact that despite the existence of this feature, it was undocumented in the manual.

As a practical language, INTERCAL is Turing-complete, meaning it actually works. But if you're planning on actually trying to use INTERCAL you should first check your sanity, and you should be prepared to wait a long time. A Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark, computing all prime numbers less than 65536, was tested on a Sun SPARCStation-1. In C, it took less than half a second; the same program in INTERCAL took more than 17 hours.

- from Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off