Wouter van Oortmerssen

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Wouter van Oortmerssen, also known as Aardappel, is a computer programmer notable for his work in game programming as well as having designed several programming languages. He has a Masters degree in computational linguistics from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in computer science from the University of Southampton. Currently he is a professor for Software Development at the Guildhall of the Southern Methodist University.

In the context of games, he has worked on Far Cry and is the creator of the open source game engines Cube and Sauerbraten. Van Oortmerssen also created PanQuake and Fisheye Quake based on the Quake source code, and WadC, a language for generating Doom levels.

Among his programming languages are FALSE, which contributed to enthusiasm for the esoteric programming language movement, and AmigaE.

A piece of trivia is that he took the "St IGNUcius" photograph of Richard Stallman that appears on Stallman's website [1].

Wouter is also known for the unusual names for his programming languages. Some of them can be quite entertaining.