I'm endlessly fascinated by the variety of programming languages people seem to be able to come up with. Esolangs.org has become one of my favourite websites over the past few years. So I was wondering... is anyone else on Dev interested in esoteric programming languages?
I noticed that I'm the only person who's ever made a post with the #esolangs tag. Am I alone in my love for these misfits?
An esolang I recently found that I think is really cool is legit, a language where programs are defined by the commit messages in a Git repository graph. The structure of the graph and the content of the commit messages determines the function of the program (the contents of the repo itself are ignored).
A "Hello World!" program in legit looks like:
$ git log --graph --oneline
* b63fd70 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Merge pull request #1 from rohieb/master
|\
| * 1f44c51 0
| |\
| |/
|/|
* | b9e1e95 "Hello world\n"
| * fbb02fe "Hello world!\n"
|/
* 8013037 (tag: reverse-loop) dup
|\
| * 6883822 write 1 left [reverse-loop]
* e0a4d04 (tag: print-loop) 1 right read dup
|\
| * d646ef4 put [print-loop]
* 25a3a62 quit
Top comments (13)
I gave a talk about the "Shakespear Programming Language" at university for the course "Modern Programming Languages".
I found the concept of having different variables being characters coming on the stage and assigning each other values via dialog an interesting concept.
I consider Shakespeare and Chef to be in the same category of esolangs, which have lots of extraneous "decoration" in order to look like something that's not a programming language.
Esoteric languages are cool! One of these days I need to dive into whitespace.
Their only problem is that becoming good at one takes a lot of effort/time and doesn't make you more employable...
I love the idea of hiding a Whitespace program within another program. A C program that has a Whitespace program mixed in with it!
Not just C but with Arnold C
GET TO THE CHOPPER
ENOUGH TALK
I like Waduzitdo.
I've never heard of that one!
That's neat! And to have written it all in Assembly... I'm glad I was born after C was created.
I sometimes look at brainfuck and that's usually enough until the next time.
Now try jsFuck.
When you think that JavaScript cannot become worse . 😀