Get the latest tech news
Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke
Concocted by sicko programmers, esolangs are the high comedy of the coding world. They test my patience.
One of Oulipo’s most prominent achievements is Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel composed entirely without the letter e —a formal constraint that, in lesser hands, could have resulted in gimmicky nonsense but instead yielded an oddly moving masterpiece. Inspired by an earlier classic called Befunge (the first 2D esolang with a rectangular grid), Hexagony isn’t just a variation with cosmetic tweaks but pulls off a tricky technical challenge in getting control flow and memory to behave coherently within a hexagonally structured source code. As I was playing with the mesmerizing Hexagony online playground, I was reminded of what Roger Ebert—who wasn’t a fan of David Lynch’s earlier films—said of Mulholland Drive: “At last his experiment doesn’t shatter the test tubes.” Every now and then, amid the wreckage of broken flasks in the eso-lang lab, a hacker channels their monomania into finding novel ways to contort the compiler.
Or read this on Wired