Languages, Platforms, and Systems that Break from the Norms of Computing
The five esolangs discussed in this piece -- Coem, Love Languages, Prāsa, Kip, and Captive -- draw on aspects of natural language usually avoided in code: nuance and ambiguity, complex grammars and morphologies. They stand apart from the better‑known, jokier esolangs like LOLCODE or RockStar, which borrow from natlangs only for their vocabulary, building lexicons of memespeak or power-ballad…
yayimhere's dream-inspired work uncovers subtle anomalies and contradictions in the strict logic of minimalist systems. » How did you discover esolangs and drew you to this form in the beginning? I only partly remember how I got into esolanging itself. I think the reason was Malbolge . It was so interesting to me, that you could make something so hard to use! Because of that, my first…
I have two pieces of esolang news: one personal, the other about this blog. First, a collection of my esolang work is now out with MIT Press. A sampling of the languages are posted on my site , but that list leans toward the implemented, which excludes some of the more poetic, less implementable langs. The book, like this blog, celebrates playing at the edges of language and code, with some…
UPDATE: Hacker News discussion on this post, 01 June 2025 It is with great excitement that we share the original INTERCAL-72 compiler source code, as both scans and transcriptions (see below). INTERCAL was created by Don Woods ( previously interviewed here ) and Jim Lyon as undergrads at Princeton in an infamous late-night session after freshman finals in 1972. Don recently rediscovered a…
In 2008, Mark Changizi, a Sloan-Swartz Fellow in Theoretical Neuroscience at Caltech, noted that the eye can make sense of complex relationships that often mystify the brain. Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our…
Collisions between the personal and the commercial in open-source have become familiar, like when an irate independent developer pulled a widely-used package entirely in 2016 bringing down hundreds of projects. But we don't expect a commercial enterprise to suddenly discover a package they have long relied on forbids any use at all—and does so for a very good reason. This was the realization…
A phonebook.yl program in Yorlang The language Yorlang began like many code projects, with a group of programmers contemplating a what-if. One evening after work, i was scrolling through the messages in a group chat that i'm in and i read a message by someone talking about how cool it will be to have a programming language in yoruba that can process the command "sope 'hello world' ". So, i thought…
If you make a language and are lucky, someone else will write code for it. If you are very lucky, someone else will find uses for it you never intended, or that even challenge the premise of the language. This is not the same as using the language in an unexpected way. Urban Müller could not have foreseen brainfuck as the bedrock for a Rust-like language or a CPU . But do these projects truly…
Zzo38 is undoubtedly the most prolific of esolangers. In addition to his long list of fully developed esolangs are his unimplemented ideas and experiments. He has been creating languages since 1994 with DZZZZ , a Funge-like language not much younger than Befunge. » Is there a meaning behind your pseudonym zzo38? "ZZO" is like "ZZT", which is a DOS-based game engine I have used in the past…
Jon Corbett's languages Cree# and Ancestral Code allow programming in Cree keywords using Cree concepts and metaphors. In addition to this language, Corbett's PhD research has led to his Indigenous Coding Framework, a work-in-progress that will help other Indigenous communities bring to computation not only their languages but their cultural logic and values as well. Corbett describes the…
Secret Piece from Yoko Ono's Grapefruit (1964) “The arts which today have the most vitality for the average person are the things he does not take to be arts” - John Dewey, Art as Experience Esolangs are experiential works. As has been expressed since the earliest posts of esoteric.codes (reiterated in this twitter thread this morning ), we engage with esolangs by writing code in them,…
David Madore is responsible for one of the best-known and most-confounding esolangs of all time: Unlambda . The language is based on the SKI combinator calculus, a super-minimalist computational system used in the mathematical analysis of algorithms, but considered impractical for coding. In Unlambda everything is a function that takes a single variable, so there are no indicators like ()s to take…
Perhaps best known for their esoteric livecoding language ORCΛ, 100 Rabbits (Rekka and Devine) have a creative practice that seamlessly crosses from the esoteric to the practical. Living on a boat and relying primarily on solar energy, they create their own tools to avoid the impracticalities and wastefulness of commercial software. Their work has a rare coherence of thought and design that…
"It's not his fault he doesn't know mal Bogle" says Col. Sanders "I was once cursed by a warlock," says Col. Harlan Sanders, in not even his most unhinged piece of dialogue on this General Hospital episode. Sanders is visiting character Maxie Jones to request she secure his secret recipe (all 11 herbs and spices), which had been threatened by a bomb Sanders himself defused using the classic…
Assembly code can appear mysterious to the uninitiated. Aspects of the physical machine abstracted away in higher-level languages are referred to directly in its terse commands. This chapbook of minimal assembly code poems (its author refers to them as "snippets") offers no solutions, context, or explanations to ease this gap, leaving the work of deciphering to the reader. For xorpd, its…
An annotated Busy Beaver program in Turing Paint One doesn't so much write a Turing Paint program as scribble it, preferably in MSPaint. Think of it as Piet meets the Turing Machine. Where Piet uses colors to indicate commands, it also essentially a Funge, where the instruction pointer is sent left or right, up or down via a command (indicated with a relative change in color). In Turing Paint,…
Oak is a rust-like language built on esoteric-inspired architecture. It was conceived as an alternative to C according to creator Adam McDaniel : I wanted a language that had all the elegance of C, such as the potential simplicity of the intermediate representation, without all of the things that make C ugly and dangerous. I added stricter type checking rules to prevent simple memory errors, and a…
Why use numbers or true or false in JavaScript when you can just simply use undefined for ALL values? From reddit's esolang subredit Let's break down what the above code is doing, and how it all works. JS is loosely typed, meaning values of one type can be used as another (this is called type coercion). Something that is not true or false will adopt a truth value when used in that context. The…
In the previous post , David Branner's insights helped explain the expressiveness of code in Wenyan, a programming language built on Classical Chinese. However, Branner's own research shows parallels between Classical Chinese and programming languages that already exist within the language. Specifically, that "Classical Chinese grammar has approximately the order of formal simplicity of a…
The Wenyan-lang Hello World program reads like this: 吾有一言。曰「「問天地好在。」」。書之。 Even those of us who don't understand the characters can likely recognize it as a form of Natural Language Programming—a programming language whose code mimics prose—in its wordiness and its structure as sentences. In fact, Wenyan is built on its namesake, Classical Chinese (or Wényán), the written…