Posted By Mike Ash on November 9th, 2005

When we’re not slaving away on updates and new products here at glamorous Rogue Amoeba Towers, we like to engage in various hobbies. And for our programmers, what could be a better hobby than… more programming! Some of our freebies came to life this way, and we all have bits and pieces of various projects lying around, waiting to be turned into something interesting, useful, or even salable.

Today, we are proud (and a bit scared) to announce that one of our very own (specifically me, Mike) has been selected as a winner in the 18th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. For those of you not familiar with this contest, the goal is to produce a small, interesting C program whose source code is extremely difficult to read and understand.

The winning entry, a self-printing LISP interpreter, won “Best use of parenthesis”. The source code is not yet officially available through the IOCCC, but for the programmers out there, you can see the source code here. If you can’t figure out what it does or how it works (which is perfectly normal, as that’s the whole point of the contest), you can see the remarks submitted to the IOCCC as part of the contest here.

For anyone reading this who’s worried about what this says about our products, rest assured that our production source code is much less horrible than our IOCCC contest entries.