Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#31

Post by lordhumphrey » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

Someone wrote: post #21

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Ook! I love esoteric languages. They're a never ending rabbit hole, and they really force you to revisit all of your assumptions about what it means to program. The most interesting ones for me were the Lambda calculus and Brainfuck. And of course there is Forth. Which always felt like it was just around the corner from some kind of breakthrough but it never really happened. Collaborative software projects and all of…

> And of course there is Forth. Which always felt like it was just around the corner from some kind of breakthrough but it never really happened. Forth, (I think even more so than lisp), is fragmented, because its philosophy is not that you write “a forth program”, but that you write “a forth” that does what you need it to do. Don’t like the sign MOD chose to compute ‘-3124 modulo -17’? Don’t add a new one, but chang…

Your musings at the end reminded me vaguely of https://www.greenarraychips.com/ a Chuck Moore designed computer chip.

"With 144 independent computers, it enables parallel or pipelined programming on an unprecedented scale. Map a data flow diagram or an analog block diagram onto its array of computers for continuous processes without interrupts or context switching."

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#32

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 11:34 AM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #26

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Ook! I love esoteric languages. They're a never ending rabbit hole, and they really force you to revisit all of your assumptions about what it means to program. The most interesting ones for me were the Lambda calculus and Brainfuck. And of course there is Forth. Which always felt like it was just around the corner from some kind of breakthrough but it never really happened. Collaborative software projects and all of…

There's more than one good way to define "esoteric" but it gave me cognitive whiplash to hear the term used about lambda calculus. I can understand that perspective, there are plenty of purpose-built esolangs which are very close to the OG lambda calculus, and depending on your background the whole thing might seem bizarre and unfamiliar and ancient and irrelevant. At least logically I see that could happen, but my h…

I'm talking about it not in the sense as the root of other programming languages but as a programming language in its own right.

If there is anything that helped me 'see the light' then it was this: that I could build anything with a core that small.

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#33

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 11:37 AM UTC

lordhumphrey wrote: post #29

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Ook! I love esoteric languages. They're a never ending rabbit hole, and they really force you to revisit all of your assumptions about what it means to program. The most interesting ones for me were the Lambda calculus and Brainfuck. And of course there is Forth. Which always felt like it was just around the corner from some kind of breakthrough but it never really happened. Collaborative software projects and all of…

Forth isn't an esoteric programming language. The word “esoteric” has a specific meaning in this context.

What do you mean? It has a tiny compiler and is quite difficult to understand, are there are any other qualities required for inclusion or is there some secret that I'm not aware of?

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#34

Post by alabhyajindal » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

> I try to write everything in JavaScript when I can and have it run in the browser.

Question for the author if they are here: why not use one of the many languages that compile to Wasm to write compilers for esoteric languages?

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#35

Post by voidUpdate » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

hcs wrote: post #20

The author's Olympus language is amusing, programs are expressed as prayers to ancient Greek gods. https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/Olympus/ It reminded me of an overambitious educational game idea: The player builds interpreters for prayers directed at several gods, each cult having its own theurgic practices resembling different programming paradigms: https://gashlin.net/blog/pages/2010-12-25-shell-script-of-th...

I was interested by the Olympus language when I saw it in TFA, but I'm a little sad that the authors website doesn't have even a basic spec. I still cant tell if the epithets are syntactic, or you just need some amount of them, like PLEASE in intercal

EDIT: According to https://esolangs.org/wiki/Olympus, you need more epithets if the line of code is more demanding (?), and you need to use varying ones, but other than that they aren't syntactic

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#36

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 12:06 PM UTC

tmtvl wrote: post #27

olmo23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racket is the canonical LISP (well, Scheme) to recommend to new users. https://racket-lang.org/

Yeah, as much as I love Common Lisp and prefer it to Scheme (despite learning Scheme first), the fact you can read the entirety of R7RS small in a single afternoon is, in my opinion, quite important in making the language approachable to beginners.

If you wish, you can install a package to run R7RS small program in Racket. Just run in the commend line

  raco pkg install r7rs

or search r7rs in the package manager inside DrRacket.

It's not maintained by the core developers, but it pass all the test suit and if you ever find a bug and post an issue in github or in the discourse group, it will be fixed very soon.

https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/package/r7rs

https://github.com/lexi-lambda/racket-r7rs

more info: https://github.com/lassik/racket-r7rs-example

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#37

Post by andsoitis » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 12:12 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #33

lordhumphrey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forth isn't an esoteric programming language. The word “esoteric” has a specific meaning in this context.

What do you mean? It has a tiny compiler and is quite difficult to understand, are there are any other qualities required for inclusion or is there some secret that I'm not aware of?

Esoteric programmign languages are created more as an experiment, joke, art project, or proof of concept than for practical software development. They prioritize novelty, challenge, or expression over practicality and efficiency.

Forth is not that.

It was designed as a practical, stack-based language for embedded systems, instrumentation, and real-time applications. It emphasizes simpilcity, extensibility, and efficiency, and has been widely used in space missions, robotics, and hardware control. While its stack-oriented, postfix syntax can look unusual to those used to C-like languages, its purpose is entirely practical, not experimental or artistic.

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#38

Post by OhMeadhbh » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #10

jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right Forth is the one you write.

In your Forth.

And then you write a custom outer interpreter to create a DSL designed to write FORTH inner interpreters.

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#39

Post by OhMeadhbh » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

Alas. No one's mentioned SNOBOL or SPITBOL. I'm sure modern coders would consider them esoteric, but for me they were kind of delightful back in the day.

Re: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code

#40

Post by OhMeadhbh » Mon, Sep 08, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #26

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Ook! I love esoteric languages. They're a never ending rabbit hole, and they really force you to revisit all of your assumptions about what it means to program. The most interesting ones for me were the Lambda calculus and Brainfuck. And of course there is Forth. Which always felt like it was just around the corner from some kind of breakthrough but it never really happened. Collaborative software projects and all of…

There's more than one good way to define "esoteric" but it gave me cognitive whiplash to hear the term used about lambda calculus. I can understand that perspective, there are plenty of purpose-built esolangs which are very close to the OG lambda calculus, and depending on your background the whole thing might seem bizarre and unfamiliar and ancient and irrelevant. At least logically I see that could happen, but my h…

Coding used to be about learning about the mathematical underpinnings of computation and then learning a specific mapping from the math to the software implementation. These days we don't teach that to undergrads (or maybe they get it in passing in a survey class.) We don't teach parsing. It seems we teach a list of features you should expect in your Python implementation or Linux version. Maybe you get a class on SQL. It's astonishing to me that kids today can get a CS degree without learning what Lambda Calculus (or even Pi Calculus) is (are). I got a PHYSICS degree and took a course on the mathematical underpinnings of computation so I would understand why all that FORTRAN code I had to maintain looked as funky as it did. As best I can tell, our 4 year research institutions are a weird mix between day care facilities and trade schools. Just once I would love to meet a recent undergrad who had taken a compilers class or understood the difference between s-expr's and m-expr's.

File under "old man yells at cloud."