Some programming languages Helping send humans to the moon, some are cooking new leukemia drugs, while others are just for being with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist "esoteric language" or "Esolang" that consists of only eight non-alphabetical characters. Esolangs are experimental, Jokey, and are deliberately difficult to use language to break the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, part of the basic "Hello, World" plan looks like.

Most Esolangs don't even look like computer code at all. Here is one way to print "hi" in Shakespeare's programming language:

The whole world is a plan.

Hamlet, the melancholy prince.
Ophelia, the sound of the machine.

Act: 1.
Scene: 1.

(Enter Hamlet and Ophelia)

Ophelia: You are as sweet as a beautiful honest, handsome, brave, peaceful aristocrat and happy gentle golden king. Say what you think!

Hamlet: You are as beautiful as the blooming lovely lovely beautiful sunshine and delicious delicious roses. You are as beautiful as your wealth and a flower. Say what you think!

(exit)

Basically, Hamlet and Ophelia are "variables" that allocate numerical values. The nouns "Lord" and "King" each have a value of +1, and the adjectives (such as "sweet" and "beautiful") serve as multipliers, yielding numbers corresponding to the ASCII character - Hamlet and "I" for Ophelia's terms. "Speak your thoughts!" Print them.

Esolangs are less popular than this. On the Esolang Wiki, you will find a list of at least 6,000 such spiral languages ​​and counts. As a Korean, I am very happy! Then there is Whitespace, an invisible language composed of things like spaces and labels. If you crave more colors, then there are Piets (like Mondrian), whose "code" consists of 20 colors arranged on the grid, producing programs that look like abstract paintings. Some eslangs are even "Turing Complete", which means they can do in theory what all responsible languages ​​(such as C++ or Python) can do (theoretically, how can you prepare 12-course Omakase with a letter bottle opener instead of a sushi knife).

But all in all, you start to doubt that all of this brain power is beneficial. Playing with them is fun, annoying, drowned like countless clones, smaller rule changes to existing languages ​​(such as whitespace, but with brackets), and languages ​​created for their profane hell. In her book Head TheoryDuchamp said literary critic Sianne Ngai fountain For Google Glass - "Too little work, but too hard." They put in very little effort, but be careful. All in all, the head may be "avoid labor" cheating, which skips the hard work of creating real substance.

So: Is solangs the head?

We programmers have Always a patient, so it is no surprise that Esolangs appeared in the early days of our history. In 1972, two Princeton students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, created the compiler language without the obvious acronym, i.e. naturally (natural). It remains one of the most fully fulfilling Eso-langs around, with a 20-page reference manual (a parody of IBM documentation) accompanied by comedy and sadism. If you don't include enough keyword instances, complain that it will also reject the program if you use too many words. You terminate a program, please give up.