INTERCAL

The Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, abbreviated INTERCAL, is an esoteric programming language that was created as a parody by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, two Princeton University students, in 1972. It satirizes aspects of the various programming languages at the time, as well as the proliferation of proposed language constructs and notations in the 1960s.

There are two currently maintained versions of INTERCAL: C-INTERCAL, maintained by Eric S. Raymond, and CLC-INTERCAL, maintained by Claudio Calvelli.

According to the original manual by the authors,

The full name of the compiler is "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym," which is, for obvious reasons, abbreviated "INTERCAL."

The original Princeton implementation used punched cards and the EBCDIC character set. To allow INTERCAL to run on computers using ASCII, substitutions for two characters had to be made: $ substituted for ¢ as the mingle operator, "represent[ing] the increasing cost of software in relation to hardware", and ? was substituted for ⊻ as the unary exclusive-or operator to "correctly express the average person's reaction on first encountering exclusive-or". In recent versions of C-INTERCAL, the older operators are supported as alternatives; INTERCAL programs may now be encoded in ASCII, Latin-1, or UTF-8.

INTERCAL was intended to be completely different from all other computer languages. Common operations in other languages have cryptic and redundant syntax in INTERCAL. From the INTERCAL Reference Manual:

It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:

any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course happen to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.

...
Wikipedia