Some programming languages helped ship people to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia medicine, and a few exist simply to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of simply eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and deliberately hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, a part of the fundamental “Hiya, World” program appears to be like like .<-.<.+++.——.—, which makes any regular individual need to say “Goodbye, World.”
Most esolangs don’t even seem like laptop code in any respect. Right here’s one approach to print “HI” within the Shakespeare Programming Language:
All of the World’s a Program.
Hamlet, a melancholy prince.
Ophelia, the voice of the machine.
Act: 1.
Scene: 1.
[Enter Hamlet and Ophelia]
Ophelia: You might be as candy because the sum of an exquisite trustworthy good-looking courageous peaceable noble Lord and a contented mild golden King. Converse your thoughts!
Hamlet: You might be as lovely because the sum of blossoming beautiful superb cute fairly sunny summer season’s day and a scrumptious candy scrumptious rose. You might be as lovely because the sum of thyself and a flower. Converse your thoughts!
[Exeunt]
Principally, Hamlet and Ophelia are “variables” to which numerical values get assigned. The nouns “Lord” and “King” every have a price of +1, and adjectives corresponding to “candy” and “lovely” act as multipliers, producing numbers that correspond to ASCII characters—“H” for Hamlet and “I” for Ophelia. “Converse your thoughts!” prints them.
Esolangs can get much more unhinged than that. On the Esolang Wiki, you’ll discover a record of a minimum of 6,000 of those screwball languages and counting. As a Korean, I’m amused by !, an esolang that requires applications to be written in grammatically right Korean. Then there’s Whitespace, an invisible language made up of issues like areas and tabs. Should you’re craving extra coloration, there’s Piet (as in Mondrian), whose “code” consists of 20 colours organized on a grid, producing applications that seem like summary work. Some esolangs are even “Turing-complete,” that means they’ll theoretically do the whole lot that extra accountable languages like C++ or Python can (very similar to how you can, in principle, use a letter opener as a substitute of a sushi knife to organize a 12-course omakase).
However taken collectively, you begin to marvel what all these brainfucks are good for. Taking part in round with them is without delay amusing and worsening, inundated as you’re with numerous clones, minor rule variations on present languages (like Whitespace however with parentheses), and languages created only for the profane hell of it. In her e-book Concept of the Gimmick, the literary critic Sianne Ngai says that gimmicks—the whole lot from Duchamp’s Fountain to Google Glass—are “working too little but additionally working too arduous.” They put in minimal effort however beg to be observed. All in all, gimmicks will be “labor-saving” cheats that skip the arduous work wanted to create one thing with actual substance.
So: Are esolangs gimmicks?
We programmers have at all times been sickos, so it’s not shocking that esolangs emerged early in our historical past. In 1972, two Princeton college students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, created the Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, or INTERCAL (naturally). It stays one of the absolutely fleshed-out eso-langs round, with a 20-page reference handbook—a parody of IBM documentation—laced with comedy and sadism. INTERCAL complains if you happen to don’t embrace sufficient cases of the key phrase PLEASE, but it surely additionally rejects applications if you happen to use the phrase an excessive amount of. You terminate a program with PLEASE GIVE UP.