Programming languages are exactly that; languages. As language they can be music, they can be art, and they can get extremely strange.
There are games that are coded to teach others to do the same; you could get yourself a degree in computer sciences from MIT (almost) for free, heck you could even knock some randomising algorithms together and sell it off for two billion dollars.
But before all of that, you need to learn to code. And who better to guide you than the skeletal killer robot we call Arnold Schwarzenegger?
On Github, arguably the most popular online meeting space for programmers, user “lhartikk” (Real name Lauri Hartikka from Finland) has made something rather strange.
ArnoldC is “A programming language based on the one liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Said Hartikka, “Although the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger are fairly well known, the true semantics of the uttering is yet to be understood. This project tries to discover new meanings from the Arnold movies with the means of computer science.”
To give you a taste of ArnoldC’s muscle, here’s a simple “Hello World” script. If you’ve never heard of it, being able to write up “Hello World” in a language is the equivalent of learning to write your name in nursery school, it’s the safe word you can always come back to.
To make some sense of what you’re reading, here is a list of the keywords from ArnoldC. Think of keywords certain phrases that tell the code what to do, it makes the following even better:
- False
I LIED
- True
NO PROBLEMO
- If
BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SAY PLEASE
- Else
BULLSHIT
- EndIf
YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR LOGIC
- While
STICK AROUND
- EndWhile
CHILL
- PlusOperator
GET UP
- MinusOperator
GET DOWN
- MultiplicationOperator
YOU'RE FIRED
- DivisionOperator
HE HAD TO SPLIT
- ModuloOperator
I LET HIM GO
- EqualTo
YOU ARE NOT YOU YOU ARE ME
- GreaterThan
LET OFF SOME STEAM BENNET
- Or
CONSIDER THAT A DIVORCE
- And
KNOCK KNOCK
- DeclareMethod
LISTEN TO ME VERY CAREFULLY
- NonVoidMethod
GIVE THESE PEOPLE AIR
- MethodArguments
I NEED YOUR CLOTHES YOUR BOOTS AND YOUR MOTORCYCLE
- Return
I'LL BE BACK
- EndMethodDeclaration
HASTA LA VISTA, BABY
- CallMethod
DO IT NOW
- AssignVariableFromMethodCall
GET YOUR ASS TO MARS
- DeclareInt
HEY CHRISTMAS TREE
- SetInitialValue
YOU SET US UP
- BeginMain
IT'S SHOWTIME
- EndMain
YOU HAVE BEEN TERMINATED
- Print
TALK TO THE HAND
- ReadInteger
I WANT TO ASK YOU A BUNCH OF QUESTIONS AND I WANT TO HAVE THEM ANSWERED IMMEDIATELY
- AssignVariable
GET TO THE CHOPPER
- SetValue
HERE IS MY INVITATION
- EndAssignVariable
ENOUGH TALK
- ParseError
WHAT THE F**K DID I DO WRONG
Okay, now that you know the basics, see if you can decipher what this piece of code does:
We don’t think the next billion-dollar game will be written in ArnoldC, but it’s one of those crazy little things that we always love seeing. And hey, if you learned something about coding or you’re even downloading ArnoldC to play around with right now, we’re happy to have brought this to your attention.