Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke

Some programming languages helped nonstop humans to nan moon, immoderate are cooking up caller leukemia drugs, and immoderate beryllium conscionable to fuck pinch you. Brainfuck is simply a minimalist “esoteric language,” aliases “esolang,” made up of conscionable 8 non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push nan boundaries of codification (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, portion of nan basal “Hello, World” programme looks like .<-.<.+++.------.---, which makes immoderate normal personification want to opportunity “Goodbye, World.”

Most esolangs don’t moreover look for illustration machine codification astatine all. Here’s 1 measurement to people “HI” successful nan Shakespeare Programming Language:

All nan World’s a Program.

Hamlet, a melancholy prince.
Ophelia, nan sound of nan machine.

Act: 1.
Scene: 1.

[Enter Hamlet and Ophelia]

Ophelia: You are arsenic saccharine arsenic nan sum of a beautiful honorable handsome brave serene noble Lord and a happy gentle aureate King. Speak your mind!

Hamlet: You are arsenic beautiful arsenic nan sum of blossoming beautiful good tiny beautiful sunny summer’s time and a delicious saccharine delicious rose. You are arsenic beautiful arsenic nan sum of thyself and a flower. Speak your mind!

[Exeunt]

Basically, Hamlet and Ophelia are “variables” to which numerical values get assigned. The nouns “Lord” and “King” each person a worth of +1, and adjectives specified arsenic “sweet” and “beautiful” enactment arsenic multipliers, producing numbers that correspond to ASCII characters—“H” for Hamlet and “I” for Ophelia. “Speak your mind!” prints them.

Esolangs tin get moreover much unhinged than that. On nan Esolang Wiki, you’ll find a database of astatine slightest 6,000 of these screwball languages and counting. As a Korean, I’m amused by !, an esolang that requires programs to beryllium written successful grammatically correct Korean. Then there’s Whitespace, an invisible connection made up of things for illustration spaces and tabs. If you’re craving much color, there’s Piet (as successful Mondrian), whose “code” is composed of 20 colors arranged connected a grid, producing programs that look for illustration absurd paintings. Some esolangs are moreover “Turing-complete,” meaning they tin theoretically do everything that much responsible languages for illustration C++ aliases Python tin (much for illustration really you could, successful theory, usage a missive opener alternatively of a sushi weapon to hole a 12-course omakase).

But taken together, you commencement to wonderment what each these brainfucks are bully for. Playing astir pinch them is astatine erstwhile amusing and irritating, inundated arsenic you are pinch countless clones, insignificant norm variations connected existing languages (like Whitespace but pinch parentheses), and languages created conscionable for nan profane hellhole of it. In her book Theory of nan Gimmick, nan literate professional Sianne Ngai says that gimmicks—everything from Duchamp’s Fountain to Google Glass—are “working excessively small but besides moving excessively hard.” They put successful minimal effort but request to beryllium noticed. All successful all, gimmicks tin beryllium “labor-saving” cheats that skip nan difficult activity needed to create thing pinch existent substance.

So: Are esolangs gimmicks?

We programmers have ever been sickos, truthful it’s not astonishing that esolangs emerged early successful our history. In 1972, 2 Princeton students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, created nan Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, aliases INTERCAL (naturally). It remains 1 of nan astir afloat fleshed-out eso-langs around, pinch a 20-page reference manual—a parody of IBM documentation—laced pinch drama and sadism. INTERCAL complains if you don’t see capable instances of nan keyword PLEASE, but it besides rejects programs if you usage nan connection excessively much. You terminate a programme pinch PLEASE GIVE UP.