Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke | EUROtoday

Some programming languages helped ship people to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia medicine, and a few exist simply to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of simply eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and deliberately hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, a part of the fundamental “Hello, World” program appears to be like like .<-.<.+++.------.---, which makes any regular particular person wish to say “Goodbye, World.”

Most esolangs don’t even appear like pc code in any respect. Here’s one strategy to print “HI” within the Shakespeare Programming Language:

All the World’s a Program.

Hamlet, a melancholy prince.
Ophelia, the voice of the machine.

Act: 1.
Scene: 1.

[Enter Hamlet and Ophelia]

Ophelia: You are as candy because the sum of an exquisite sincere good-looking courageous peaceable noble Lord and a contented mild golden King. Speak your thoughts!

Hamlet: You are as lovely because the sum of blossoming beautiful advantageous cute fairly sunny summer time’s day and a scrumptious candy scrumptious rose. You are as lovely because the sum of thyself and a flower. Speak your thoughts!

[Exeunt]

Basically, Hamlet and Ophelia are “variables” to which numerical values get assigned. The nouns “Lord” and “King” every have a price of +1, and adjectives resembling “sweet” and “beautiful” act as multipliers, producing numbers that correspond to ASCII characters—“H” for Hamlet and “I” for Ophelia. “Speak your mind!” prints them.

Esolangs can get much more unhinged than that. On the Esolang Wiki, you’ll discover a listing of at the very least 6,000 of those screwball languages and counting. As a Korean, I’m amused by !, an esolang that requires packages to be written in grammatically right Korean. Then there’s Whitespace, an invisible language made up of issues like areas and tabs. If you’re craving extra coloration, there’s Piet (as in Mondrian), whose “code” consists of 20 colours organized on a grid, producing packages that appear like summary work. Some esolangs are even “Turing-complete,” which means they will theoretically do all the pieces that extra accountable languages like C++ or Python can (very similar to how you may, in principle, use a letter opener as an alternative of a sushi knife to organize a 12-course omakase).

But taken collectively, you begin to marvel what all these brainfucks are good for. Playing round with them is directly amusing and worsening, inundated as you’re with numerous clones, minor rule variations on present languages (like Whitespace however with parentheses), and languages created only for the profane hell of it. In her guide Theory of the Gimmickthe literary critic Sianne Ngai says that gimmicks—all the pieces from Duchamp’s Fountain to Google Glass—are “working too little but also working too hard.” They put in minimal effort however beg to be seen. All in all, gimmicks could be “labor-saving” cheats that skip the exhausting work wanted to create one thing with actual substance.

So: Are esolangs gimmicks?

We programmers have all the time been sickos, so it’s not stunning that esolangs emerged early in our historical past. In 1972, two Princeton college students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, created the Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, or INTERCAL (naturally). It stays one of the totally fleshed-out eso-langs round, with a 20-page reference guide—a parody of IBM documentation—laced with comedy and sadism. INTERCAL complains should you don’t embrace sufficient situations of the key phrase PLEASE, but it surely additionally rejects packages should you use the phrase an excessive amount of. You terminate a program with PLEASE GIVE UP.