Languages

[squirmelia]

I have been learning Ruby on Codecademy, prompted by the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book. So far I am 56% of the way through.

For the Computer Anonymous meet-up on Thursday, I am thinking of printing out some entries from Esolang the esoteric programming languages wiki. I missed my train stop this morning, due to being too distracted by esoteric programming languages. Chef, is a well known one, where programs look like recipes to cook. The Shakespeare Programming Language is probably another you may have heard of, but there's also languages such as the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic inspired FiM++:

A Hello World example, written in FiM++ is given:
------------------------------------
Dear Princess Celestia: Hello World!

Today I learned something simple.
I said “Hello, World!”!
That's all about something simple!

Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.
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There are also programming languages where programs are like pictures, such as Piet, where programs look like abstract paintings, and BlackCoffin.gif, which uses black and white pixels.

Any suggestions of other esoteric languages I should print out descriptions of?

Comments

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

OOK and Brainfuck are always entertaining - and OOK is a bit less offensively named. But the best, best esoteric programming language is Homespring:

http://bunny.xeny.net/linked/Homespring-Proposed-Language-Standard.pdf

Homespring uses the paradigm of a river to create its astoundingly user-friendly
semantics. Each program is a river system which flows into the watershed (the
terminal output). Information is carried by salmon (which represent string
values), which swim upstream trying to find their home river. Terminal input
causes a new salmon to be spawned at the river mouth; when a salmon leaves
the river system for the ocean, its value is output to the terminal. In this way,
terminal I/O is neatly and elegantly represented within the system metaphor.

The paper has more details.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I was already familiar with Brainfuck and found Ook yesterday (although promptly forgot - thanks for the reminder!) Homespring sounds interesting too.