Jesse

Posted on Jun 29, 2020

Most Esoteric Language You've Used

#discuss

Title pretty much sums it up.

I work using a kind of unusual proprietary language (in the sense that it has a niche audience), and am wondering what the strangest language y'all have used is. 😄

Oldest comments (37)

Sam Ferree • Jun 30 '20

Depends on your definition of “use” but I try to complete as many programming challenges as I can in Befunge, or Funge++ my procedural extension.

I wrote a template engine called Candle that was inspired by Razor, but used CSV files as the view model and wasn’t specific to html. A company I worked for used that all the time for data conversion jobs in a smattering of ways. I originally developed it to take CSV output from one system and project it onto an XML template for upload into another system. Saved the company like $40k in consulting fees and they ended up using it for a whole bunch of stuff.

Wish I still had the compiler for it, it was pretty handy given the amount of data that lives only in spreadsheets...

Jesse • Jun 30 '20

That sounds incredibly useful, I really hope you got a hefty raise for saving them so much $$

Leoni Mella • Jun 30 '20 • Edited

Elixir. Not super esoteric, but the least used language that I use on work.

But I use a PHP framework called Phalcon and that I consider to much esoteric

amananandrai • Jun 30 '20

I have used Brainf**k, Arnold C and Piet.

Exploring the ArnoldC programming language

amananandrai ・ Apr 11 ・ 1 min read

#watercooler #esotericlanguages

Piet is a language whose code looks like an abstract painting.

Jesse • Jun 30 '20

Wow, I had no idea a language like Piet existed 😮, I'm definitely going to check it out--it's right up my alley!

Dave Parr • Jun 30 '20

Tidal Cycles, a Haskell package to generate algorithmic rave music:

tidalcycles.org/index.php/Welcome

ferceg • Jun 30 '20

IBM Net.Data on AS/400... a long time ago in a company, far, far away.

mcpressonline.com/programming/web-...

("now" means ~year 2000)

Jon Randy 🎖️ • Jun 30 '20 • Edited

I dabbled in Rockstar for fun - codewithrockstar.com - I guess that makes me a rockstar developer! 😛

I've also written in Z80 assembly language which I guess is quite unusual

Mike Talbot ⭐ • Jun 30 '20

Woo Rockstar is hilariously cool. I think my weirdest assembler coding is ARM RISC on an Acorn Archimedes.

Madza • Jun 30 '20 • Edited

Any real 10x dev codes in Whitespace :)

Galuh Utama • Jun 30 '20 • Edited

Probably not esoteric but I have coded in nasm (netwide assembler) and prolog. Just for fun.

Eljay-Adobe • Jun 30 '20

For real applications, I think my most esoteric programming languages I have used have been: Prolog, Adam, Eve0.8, Eve2.

Prolog is a declarative language of relations, which solves for queries. I used it when I was a linguistics major. It was created by Alain Colmerauer and Robert Kowalski.

Adam is a declarative language of relations and constraints, which solves for state. It was created by Sean Parent.

Eve0.8 and Eve2 are declarative layout languages, for describing where static text, buttons, edit fields, pulldown, columns, rows, et cetera all go. They have similarities to WPF XAML. Both were also created by Sean Parent.

For toy programs, I've used quite a few of the well known different (and silly) programming languages.

Nathan Minchow • Jun 30 '20

I used Prolog in a programming languages course in college.

The class was supposed to introduce us to how different languages approached similar problems. I was able to make the switch to functional programming with Haskell pretty easily, but Prolog did not click.

lbonanomi • Jun 30 '20

I've taken money (very briefly) to debug procedures in TANDEM Access Command Language.

Holy-Elie Scaïde • Jun 30 '20

Definitely bash

Jesse • Jun 30 '20

ngl, I always thought bash was well known/widely used. Maybe it's less common than I thought, or maybe just decreased in use over the years

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Jun 30 '20

This is just my perspective, but despite bash (and POSIX shell scriptt in a more general sense) being widely used and relatively well known, I'd actually still consider it a somewhat esoteric language simply because of how drastically different it is from most mainstream programming languages.

There are all kinds of strange quirks and odd holdovers from the largely organic development of the language which make it difficult for people to learn and use in a lot of cases. Examples of this that come to mind include:

It's comparatively trivial to use computed variable names without using maps/dictionaries/hashes.
A large number of metacharacters have behavior that's dependent on their context, sometimes including what adjacent whitespace they have (see ! in the context of the conditional in an if statement for a really good example, depending on the exact shell and how you put whitespace around it, it's either a command history lookup, a negation of the condition, or a syntax error).
Statements resulting in errors don't terminate the script executing them (except that on some rare occasions they actually do) unless you configure the shell to have them work that way.
Controlled error propagation requires a non-negligible amount of code and has no side-channel (you can only do it through return codes or variables, there is no dedicated concept of an exception/error that can be caught like in many languages).
Errors in pipelines are dependent on later commands in the pipeline for error propagation, and most commands just eat the error.

Jesse • Jun 30 '20

Loved reading this comment, thanks for sharing all this!

Kelvin Mai • Jun 30 '20

viml, clojure and bash for me

Jesse • Jun 30 '20

I have a couple of colleagues who love Clojure, and it's on my list to check out if/when I ever get enough time outside of the other projects in my queue. The language I currently use is also LISP-inspired, but Clojure is more like a true LISP 😄