Esoteric Programming Languages

led_belly writes: "I came across this interesting page from the #alt.linux IRC chat room topic (irc.keystreams.com). It is an interesting read for all those who have ever been baffled by why/how some people do things. The Yahoo! Webring listing of similar topics is here."

Comments

Re:thoughts....

[skullY]

I wonder... if someone were to write an OSS product using one of these more obfuscated languages, I think we should ban from bearing the title OSS. People wouldnt be able to understand the code at all for their own uses or improvements. Hence it'll be Open source, but instead only the original developer would know anything about how it works, make changes, etc.

And that's different from perl how?

APL

[maxpublic]

If you want a strange programming language that garnered virtually no support and was a real pain in the ass, look up APL (primarily used at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, because the guy who invented it was a professor there).

APL was defined by coding which wasn't particularly inventive but which required a complete keyboard overlay - it didn't use ASCII characters (except in text, as I recall), but rather a mixture of greek symbols and shit the author just plain made up. So in effect you had to match 'objects' to keys on the keyboard, a completely non-intuitive way of typing. Talk about watching your hands while you work....

Unfortunately the college was incredibly gung-ho on APL and thought it would revolutionize coding, so if we wanted to do any serious work we had to do it in APL. This meant that about a dozen of us sat around learning APL so that we could program what might have been (don't really know, but I don't know of any other examples in 1983) the most massively multiplayer Star Trek ship battle game to date (up to 127 players, although the mainframe usually came to a grinding halt when we passed the 70 or 80 player mark). We then passed this program off as a science project, which it was accepted as since no one else could read the damned thing.

Well, I guess it had a use after all....

Max

Re:Programming challenge

[dido]

Actually, deCSS HAS been written in Brainfuck. See this link on David Touretzky's home page.

Eubonicode

[GrEp]

Back when I took compiler construction at Drake University three of us got together and made our own programming language called Eubonicode to help those who like to engage in ghetto algorithmic expression. I threw it up on the website. Here is the fibbonacci code:

sup
{
gimme fibo bitch
a be 1 bitch
b be 1 bitch
putou a bitch
putou b bitch
fibo be fibo widout 2 bitch
slongas (fibo bepimpin 0)
c be a an b bitch
a be b bitch
b be c bitch
putou b bitch
dissin fibo bitch
nomo
}