the IOCCC
loreprogrammingops culture
Stands for: International Obfuscated C Code Contest
The contest, running since 1984, that celebrates the most gloriously unreadable working C programs on Earth.
Founded by Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel, the International Obfuscated C Code Contest rewards programs that abuse the language's every dark corner while still compiling and doing something wonderful: flight simulators shaped like airplanes, self-reproducing haiku, compilers in a few tortured lines. It is simultaneously a joke, a museum of C's semantics, and a security education, since obfuscated-but-functional is exactly what malicious code looks like. The judges' favorite category of all: abuse of the rules.