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Ivan Reese 2025-09-27 04:51:19

Feeling of Computing • Episode 78 • Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

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.

Christopher Shank 2025-09-27 06:28:48

Excited to give this a listen! This is very much related to new podcast name and podcast itself, but when I was visiting Austria earlier this month I randomly happened to be in Linz during their big Ars Electronica festival. One of my favorite exhibits was an esoteric language called feel.exe by Camilla Scholz. It's am esoteric shader language that is written by expressing feelings

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🎥 IMG_6800.mov

Personal Dynamic Media 2025-09-27 19:47:14

Jimmy Miller In your challenge, are we allowed to use library functions that use booleans internally, such as min()?

Alex McLean 2025-09-27 22:02:09

Nice listen! You mentioned Orca, which isn't really an esolang in that it's made for practical use and has a large community of practice around it, despite looking a lot like befunge. I think Devine had seen befunge before, but had forgotten about it and hadn't consciously used it as a reference. I think that supports Lu's point that esotericness is relative.

Jimmy Miller 2025-09-27 22:18:57

@Personal Dynamic Media Really up to you. If you feel it’s not cheating go for it. Theres not hard and fast rule. I recommend people going till they don’t think they can eliminate more.

Rory Byrne 2025-09-28 15:35:02

I want to revive this old prototype I built - Codeline. It's a tool that lets you run commands from your source code comments. Anyone interested in helping?

Some ideas:

  • Build a LSP server that can detect appropriate comments and run the commands/add CodeLens context/other stuff
  • Finish off the SDK so people can build new commands
  • Modernise the tooling ( poetry -> uv , make -> just etc)
  • Build a few commands
  • Design a way to decouple commands from the codebase, so they can be installed independently.
  • Use treesitter to find relevant comments
  • Permission system for risky actions (e.g. rm )
  • ...
Rory Byrne 2025-09-28 15:36:54

The general goal is to build a system that makes source code comments more interactive, in a safe and secure way.

Alternatively, it could be seen as an editor-agnostic plugin system.

Rory Byrne 2025-09-28 15:39:56

I've also got another one related to making comments more useful: anot. It just extracts structured data from comments. Intended to be a building block for other tools (incl. codeline, probably).