Close Menu
Technology Mag

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    What's Hot

    SpaceX Starship Finally Pulls Off a Successful Test Flight

    August 30, 2025

    The Era of AI-Generated Ransomware Has Arrived

    August 30, 2025

    Scientists Just Caught Human Embryo Implantation on Camera

    August 30, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Subscribe
    Technology Mag
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube
    • Home
    • News
    • Business
    • Games
    • Gear
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Security
    • Trending
    • Press Release
    Technology Mag
    Home » Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke
    Business

    Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke

    News RoomBy News RoomMay 22, 20253 Mins Read
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Email

    Some programming languages helped send humans to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia drugs, and some exist just to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of just eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, part of the basic “Hello, World” program looks like .<-.<.+++.——.—, which makes any normal person want to say “Goodbye, World.”

    Most esolangs don’t even look like computer code at all. Here’s one way to print “HI” in 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 sweet as the sum of a beautiful honest handsome brave peaceful noble Lord and a happy gentle golden King. Speak your mind!

    Hamlet: You are as beautiful as the sum of blossoming lovely fine cute pretty sunny summer’s day and a delicious sweet delicious rose. You are as beautiful as the 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 have a value of +1, and adjectives such as “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 even more unhinged than that. On the Esolang Wiki, you’ll find a list of at least 6,000 of these screwball languages and counting. As a Korean, I’m amused by !, an esolang that requires programs to be written in grammatically correct Korean. Then there’s Whitespace, an invisible language made up of things like spaces and tabs. If you’re craving more color, there’s Piet (as in Mondrian), whose “code” is composed of 20 colors arranged on a grid, producing programs that look like abstract paintings. Some esolangs are even “Turing-complete,” meaning they can theoretically do everything that more responsible languages like C++ or Python can (much like how you could, in theory, use a letter opener instead of a sushi knife to prepare a 12-course omakase).

    But taken together, you start to wonder what all these brainfucks are good for. Playing around with them is at once amusing and irritating, inundated as you are with countless clones, minor rule variations on existing languages (like Whitespace but with parentheses), and languages created just for the profane hell of it. In her book Theory of the Gimmick, the literary critic Sianne Ngai says that gimmicks—everything from Duchamp’s Fountain to Google Glass—are “working too little but also working too hard.” They put in minimal effort but beg to be noticed. All in all, gimmicks can be “labor-saving” cheats that skip the hard work needed to create something with real substance.

    So: Are esolangs gimmicks?

    We programmers have always been sickos, so it’s not surprising that esolangs emerged early in our history. In 1972, two Princeton students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, created the Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, or INTERCAL (naturally). It remains one of the most fully fleshed-out eso-langs around, with a 20-page reference manual—a parody of IBM documentation—laced with comedy and sadism. INTERCAL complains if you don’t include enough instances of the keyword PLEASE, but it also rejects programs if you use the word too much. You terminate a program with PLEASE GIVE UP.

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Email
    Previous ArticleSpaceX Tests Starship Fixes After Back-to-Back Failures
    Next Article Microsoft Notepad can now write for you using generative AI

    Related Posts

    Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors

    August 28, 2025

    Alexis Ohanian’s Next Social Platform Has One Rule: Don’t Act Like an Asshole

    August 27, 2025

    AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

    August 26, 2025

    Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over App Store Rankings

    August 26, 2025

    A Crypto Micronation Is Making Friends at the White House

    August 26, 2025

    The Trump-Intel Deal Is Official

    August 25, 2025
    Our Picks

    The Era of AI-Generated Ransomware Has Arrived

    August 30, 2025

    Scientists Just Caught Human Embryo Implantation on Camera

    August 30, 2025

    US Government Seeks Medical Records of Trans Youth

    August 29, 2025

    Leak suggests new Philips Hue lights will have direct Matter support

    August 29, 2025
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Vimeo
    Don't Miss
    News

    Microsoft’s next annual update for Windows 11 is in Release Preview testing

    By News RoomAugust 29, 2025

    So, will you see new UI features or more AI tweaks included on your desktop…

    TikTok is now letting everyone DM each other with voice memos and pictures

    August 29, 2025

    Hisense’s take on the Samsung Frame TV is $300 off

    August 29, 2025

    Framework actually did it: I upgraded a laptop’s entire GPU in just three minutes

    August 29, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of use
    • Advertise
    • Contact
    © 2025 Technology Mag. All Rights Reserved.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.