esoteric.codes

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.

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 have two pieces of esolang news: one personal, the other about this blog.

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).

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.

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.

A phonebook.yl program in Yorlang The language Yorlang began like many code projects, with a group of programmers contemplating a what-if.

If you make a language and are lucky, someone else will write code for it.

Zzo38 is undoubtedly the most prolific of esolangers.

Jon Corbett's languages Cree# and Ancestral Code allow programming in Cree keywords using Cree concepts and metaphors.

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.

David Madore is responsible for one of the best-known and most-confounding esolangs of all time: Unlambda.

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.

"It's not his fault he doesn't know mal Bogle" says Col.

Assembly code can appear mysterious to the uninitiated.

An annotated Busy Beaver program in Turing Paint One doesn't so much write a Turing Paint program as scribble it, preferably in MSPaint.

Oak is a rust-like language built on esoteric-inspired architecture.

Why use numbers or true or false in JavaScript when you can just simply use undefined for ALL values?

In the previous post, David Branner's insights helped explain the expressiveness of code in Wenyan, a programming language built on Classical Chinese.

The Wenyan-lang Hello World program reads like this: 吾有一言。