Software Parody

It is relatively easy to define "parody" when the object of parody is a book, poem, movie, or piece of music. What would it mean to parody a piece of software?

Functional Objects Can Be Parodied

It will not do to claim that software is immune to parody because it is a functional construct. A building is functional, yet its structure could be parodied, perhaps by a distorted replica having stretched hallways with non-rectangular cross sections, and doorways which are too small for humans or which lead nowhere. (Architecture in general can also be parodied: consider the ridiculous effect of a diminutive Arc de Triomphe in the middle of a normal-sized roundabout.)

Furthermore, it is mistaken to claim that poetry or literature is not functional; that belief persists only because most people are not familiar with the mechanics of the forms, and have never thought of those media in functional terms. The function of a poem, for instance, is to snag the reader's brain, and plant an image or feeling inside it, by clever use of diction within the constraints of meter.

In sum, functionality of an object is no barrier to parodying it.

Comedic Programs and Languages

Comedy is not parody; the latter is a subset of the former. Comedy programming languages have been written. INTERCAL is the classic example. To name just one of its rules, a program written in INTERCAL requires a certain number of PLEASE tokens before the compiler will accept it.

I believe that INTERCAL constitutes a parody of programming languages. But even a program written in INTERCAL, such as a program that counts words in an input file, is still a program, not a parody of a program. Its functionality, though obscured in an amusing way by the ludicrous language, is still present.

Comedy programs have also been written, often in ordinary programming languages. One of the goals of participants in the International Obfuscated C Contest is to amuse the C-savvy reader by contorting the notoriously flexible C language into bizarre shapes that still run as code. (My favorite is "Signed Char Lotte," Paul Westley's entry from 1990 which reads as a series of letters between a man and jilted lover.)

char*lie;
    double time, me= !0XFACE,
    not; int rested,   get, out;
    main(ly, die) char ly, **die ;{
    	signed char lotte,
dear; (char)lotte--;
    for(get= !me;; not){
    1 -  out & out ;lie;{
    char lotte, my= dear,
    **let= !!me !not+ ++die;
    	(char)(lie=

However, comedy is still not parody. To achieve parody code, we need to find a program which achieves comedy by imitating another piece of code.

At time of writing, I have been unable to find such a thing. Please email me if you have any ideas.