78 • Let’s Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously
2025-09-26
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One of the biggest goals of this show — our raisin detour, if you will — is to encourage people to look at computer programming differently. It’s not just a job, or a way to make the computer do what you want. Code isn’t just the material you sculpt into apps and games and websites. The very act of programming itself, and the languages we make and use to do that programming, reflect who we are as people. Programming languages say something.
Esolangs — esoteric programming languages — are programming languages created for these more self-reflective purposes. To some, they’re defined by what they’re not: not for serious use, not for education, not for efficiency. To others, they’re a bunch of funny jokes that people can commiserate through after suffering the steep learning curve of becoming a programmer. A few find in them an opportunity to explore strange computational models, or baffling syntax designs. But is there more to them? Could there be?
In this episode, we’re discussing a preprint of the paper Let’s Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously by Jeremy Singer and Steve Draper, and struggling with what it even means to give esoteric languages their due.
Links⚓︎
$ Each of these episodes is a labour of love. If you appreciate that labour, slip us a five on Patreon. As is the norm, you’ll get a second RSS feed with a bonus episode each and ev-er-y month. Except this month, there’s actually two (2) bonus episodes, for the simple reason that this podcast swells with bubbles of hot waxy fluid that spill the container of my Ableton Live when they pop. The first pop is a half hour cut from this esolangs ep, the three of us brainstorming esolangs we’d enjoy, super casual and playful, perfect for building your parasocial podcast relationship, you’ll love it. The second bonus, as I’m sure you’ve been expecting, is three hours of Jimmy and I relaying our experiences with Silksong, unpacking its few contentious design decisions, fawning over exquisite details, the good shit. So yeah, hand us one hundred nickles, help Ivan repair his basement, enjoy more of… whatever this is.
- Daniel Tempkin 🛌 😴💤😘
- esoteric.codes
- Daniel’s new book, Forty-Four Esolangs
- Joana Chicau
- The Less Humble Programmer
- Esolangs Wiki
- Entropy, an esolang by (total dreamboat) Daniel Tempkin
- Unnecessary, the 4:33 of esolangs, by Keymaker
- Turing Paint by Byron Knoll, which is similar to Brian Silverman’s Wireworld and Lu’s Cableworld
- Ivan’s Visual Programming Codex, a collection of all the cool visual programming things Ivan has come across in his travels.
- Riskopoly — The Game of Capitalist Imperialism!
- Fanny#In_slang
- Brainfuck and Whitespace are two canonical esolangs.
- Our episode on Structure of a Programming Language Revolution, which includes extended discussion of Ivan’s father-in-law’s lookalike.
- Dreamberd is one of Lu’s Esoteric programming languages, which has a (let’s just say) “interesting” relationship with AI.
- The Story of Mel
- Piet, Befunge, and Malbolge are more classic, oft-cited esolangs.
- Fractran deserves special mention, since the language is comprised entirely of fractions, which is pretty neat.
- MarkovJunior also deserves special mention. Seriously, go look at the examples. Wild stuff. It’s by Maxim Gumin, who also did the famous WaveFunctionCollapse project.
- We did an entire interview episode about Orca with creator Devine Lu Linvega, who more recently made Tote, a reversible rewriting sandbox.
- Reversible computing, something Ivan is particularly interested in.
- XKCD’s comic X, about a programming language that uses fonts creatively.
- ArnoldC is one of those esolangs, like Shakespeare, Chef (which, actually, is kinda good actually if you actually have to eat whatever you code), or LOLCODE
- Wat; still hits.
- Bodyfuck
- Evil.css, “subtle and not-so-subtle CSS rules that will slowly drive people insane”
- Hest doesn’t exist.
- Code golfing is the practice of making your code as succinct as possible, often at the expense of readability (though it leads certain people to write really good coffeescript). The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is related, in that it’s about writing C code where unreadability is the goal.
- Jimmy would like to challenge y’all to write Fizz Buzz with no booleans, no conditionals, no pattern matching, or other things that are like disguised booleans.
- Arroost is a musical programming environment Lu made to NORMALIZE SHARING SCRAPPY FIDDLES. Inform is a natural programming language for interactive storytelling. PuzzleScript is a rewriting language for making tile-based puzzle games. Each of these sits at an interesting spot somewhere on the twisty boundary between the programming meaning of “expression” and the human meaning of “expression”.
- The School for Poetic Computation occasionally runs a class called Digital Love Languages.
- Coming Out Simulator and other works by Nicky Case, and dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, are wonderful examples of the sort of deeply personal expression Lu and Ivan would like to see in programming tools.
- What music does Ivan listen to? Well… here’s most of it.
- What music does Ivan make? Well… here’s some of it. But Jimmy is fond of Diminished Fifth, an attempt to make some shrinking music with ClojureScript. It’s no Merzbow.
- Zachtronics games, like exapunks — are they esolangs? A good number of recent videogames have included conlangs (constructed languages), such as 2023’s fabulous Chants of Sennaar — but beware of spoilers, as some of these games might use the obscurity of the conlang to hide secrets in plain sight. Minecraft, natch, has a conlang for enchantments, and it’s worth mentioning that redstone is an esolang of a sort. And then there’s the Turing tarpit games, like Baba is You… the list goes on.
- Perhaps Tidal Cycles and Strudel are esolangs? Perhaps also the Game of Life?
- Hedy is an unabashed push to do something different!
- Jonathan Richman’s He Gave Us The Wine To Taste It is probably my favourite of the various attempts artists have made to plead with their audiences: don’t overthink this! (Friends of the show might be familiar with this one.)
- Isomorf let you view your program with your choice of syntax. It’s like Hedy, but less humanitarian.
- Poe’s Law is not Postel’s law
Music used in this episode:
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See you in dreamland~
