Mork? Are you kidding me?

So I've recently learned that Mozilla Firefox stores some of it's profile data in "Mork" formatted files. I wanted to recover some data that I had submitted in a web form the other day, but then subsequently lost. I don't want to have to re-write it. So I figured "Hey, I can just grab it from Firefox's formhistory.dat file! No problem." <-- WRONG, fucking Mork.

After some Google'ing, I found some info on Mork. David McCusker, a Netscape engineer, invented Mork, a generic textual database file format "loosely inspired by LISP." The following quote from some geek's blog seems to sum it up: [see original post here]

This looks like a model example of somebody who's written code to prove how smart they are, rather than to merely do the simplest thing in the simplest way. I've observed that this is the key difference between developers who are bright, and developers who think they're bright and love to broadcast it to the world.

However, it has to be said that going on what I've seen of McCusker's publicly-indexed emails and forum posts, he is quite literally certifiably nuts, and thus probably deserves to be cut a little slack. For crying out loud, this man writes everything in haiku.

I hate showoff's. Of course, I probably could have just re-written my lost form data by now, but hoping that a little research would pay off countless times in the future, I pursued this 'formhistory.dat' business. No cigar.