ESOTERIC.CODES

As the creator of languages like Underload, and an administrator of the esolangs.org wiki, ais523 talks through what makes esolangs interesting and challenging vs thematic and gimmicky. (Interview)

In this second interview with ais523, we discuss his experiments at finding 'the essence of programming,' using analog computing, extreme minimalism, and a deletionist model of computation (Interview)

Alex was a key developer of live coding as a musical practice, and, with Nick Collins, created the Algorave concept. Alex has developed software for coding-as-performance, including TidalCycles. (Interview)

Allison Parrish is a poet and programmer who researches and makes art about language, often in the context of computation and the Internet. She is the creator of the everyword Twitterbot and the author most recently of Articulations, a book of generative poems from an algorithm which extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their similarities. (Interview)

Annie's work brings engagement with code to theatre, with experimental works where performers (human and non-) act on generated music or texts. (Interview)

Ben is an early esolanger, whose Malbolge, a language created in a single afternoon, is still considered the most challenging to code; he gives insight into the early days of esolangs. (Interview)

Chris has been making esolangs before they had a name; he helped foster the community through the mailing list where much of the early discussion took place, and is responsible for the enormously influential Befunge language, among many others. (Interview)

David Madore is responsible for Unlambda, one of the best-known and most-confounding esolangs of all time. An accomplished mathematician, Madore also produced languages that cross from natural numbers into infinity, but may be incompatible with our Universe (Interview)

David has created some of the best-known esolangs, including Chef and Piet, which exress code within other rule-based systems, and Whenever, a language that overturns a key element of how code is controlled. (Interview)

Before brainfuck and Befunge, there was INTERCAL. Don Woods discusses the creation of this pioneering esolang and how he looks at geek culture today. (Interview)

Eric, best known for his work in the free software / open source movement, is also responsible for developing C-INTERCAL in 1990, a critical moment for esolangs, from the 70s language INTERCAL, perhaps the very first esolang (Interview)

Evan Buswell sees the history of computer science as completely suffused with the anxiety about the possibility of code changing state. Here he explores alternatives that embrace this anxiety and see where it leads (Interview)

Corbett discusses how Cree#, which began as a "Processing for Indigenous Languages," grew into a suite of tools: a full-fledged Cree-based programming language, associated keyboard, and a toolkit to bring other Indigenous languages into computation (Interview)

Keymaker created one of my favorite languages, Unnecessary. In this, the very first interview for esoteric.codes (from January 2011), Keymaker discusses his work in esolanging and in brainfuck programming (Interview)

Martin Ender creates 2D languages of unusual topologies, with code arranged in hexagons, triangles, or using registers arranged in icosohedral structures. We discuss the aesthetics of Funges and golfing languages, and how to both make a complex esolang clear enough for programmers to be able to engage with its central premise. (Interview)

Martin created (or, in a sense, discovered) JSFuck, an esoteric approach to JavaScript. His other work similarly deals with code as a self-referential medium. (Interview)

Ramsey explores alternate computer histories and examines the biases of code through his languages and environments (Interview)

Scott founded esolangs.org, the indispensable depository of esolang knowledge. Here he talks about the history of the form and the key role esoprogrammers play. (Interview)

Winnie's academic research and artistic practice, is at the forefront of critical code studies. Her thesis centers on the animated throbber, the marker of code liveness. She has been awarded the Top-Ranked LABS Abstracts 2017 by Leonardo and the Winner of The 2018 Aarhus University Research Foundation PhD award, as well as the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter among many others. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, teaching Aesthetic Programming and Digital Culture. (Interview)

Wouter created FALSE, the language which inspired Befunge and brainfuck, launching esolangs as we know them today. He also created the once-enormously-popular (non-esoteric) Amiga E language. (Interview)

Looking to Fluxus for strategies of breaking down the ordinary performance of code-writing into a new form of art

Why use numbers when you can leave them ... undefined?

Through the concept of computational idealism, we can see how some esoprograms re-assert order within the seeming chaos of the esolang. They "rehabilitate" the language by showing that simple, elegant code can be written within it, despite its alien appearance

Having storage issues? These three file systems make your hard drive virtually limitless.

Joana Chicau brings classical ballet training to a new form of live web performance, in live-editing existing web pages. She does so with a mix of pre-set and spontaneously written html and javascript on top of found material.

A web oddity full of generative images that claims to collect Malbolge programs

An astonishing 128 language Ouroborous quine

0. Computers are logical systems that arise as often by accident as by design.

On SUBLEQ, the most basic of languages, and DawnOS, the obsessive OS built on it

A look at early AI, another interface between computation and human understanding

When personal style and overt cleverness are the point: esolanging, code golf, and obfuscated code as a counterpoint to Dijkstra

Vocabulary-based esolangs are sometimes overlooked. Here's a look at those who use intriguing lexicons to challenge conventional notions of computation

Empty files, blank canvases, and other seemingly content-less carriers of meaning

A contrast between languages engaging with logic and those engaging with the surface of code (continued)

Languages where coding isn't the point

We experience esolangs in an active, participatory way, usually by writing code. The esolanger asks a question through the language; the esoprogrammers explore this by writing code within the language.

Differentiating three disciplines within creative coding

Unusable for any kind of programming, these languages embrace the extremes of dematerialized digital practice

How to think in brainfuck by constructing a single number

On the Collaborative Spirit of Esolanging, or: If You Make a Language and You Are Very Lucky, People Will Misuse it

Making visible the labor of programming (Project)

A theoretical language that allows access at both higher and lower levels, including controlling chip-based operations, evaluated in terms of Kittler's Protected Mode (Project)

Programs in the Chef language are also cooking recipes, making Chef a multicoding esolang. Looking to this early example of an esolang that embraces multicoding, we consider what's at stake in these languages and the possibilities of multicoding aesthetics. (Project)

code::art publishes programs that expand the definitions of both code and art (Project)

A program that performs its own writing, reading, and execution (Project)

A computing language with natural language input that always understands you (Project)

Will Hicks's Esopo project, a Turing Complete poetic system, including the languages AshPaper, Correspond, and Emily (Project)

19th Century mathematical ambitions revived as a programming language, written in Frege's concept-script (Project)

Messing with internet hostnames in JODI's web-modernist masterpiece (Project)

This shader-based esolang has a new type of flexible lexicon, making it easier for programmer-poets to focus on compelling code and visuals (Project)

An initial look at the esoteric coding style for JS (be sure to also see the interview with its creator, Martin Kleppe) (Project)

Why do we need both 0s and 1s? A language that shows you don't (Project)

Connect to the wrong wifi and every site serves inexplicable words (Project)

Inject mayhem into code with look-alike characters (Project)

Arduino, SalesForce, and other high-profile software projects were recently revealed to break the license agreement for Monkey. That license, created for good reason: no one should use it, ever. (Project)

With his experiments in all-mov compilation, Chris Domas shows how the text of code can be divorced from behavior, even at the assembly level. Then he goes even further, reducing every possible program into one. (Project)

Oak: a rust-like language built on a minimalist back-end inspired by brainfuck (Project)

A (spoken) language that promotes misunderstanding and trippy surreality (Project)

Open and Shut allows typing without touching the keyboard. It reduces the laptop to a telegraph key, where slamming it shut repeatedly marks dashes and dots (Project)

Don't store locally, save your files to the 'cloud': in pieces, endlessly traversing the Internet (Project)

A tool that embeds images into prime numbers (Project)

Reading as Writing, Coding as Public Performance (Project)

regex2fat translates regexes like the one above into disk images, creating a labyrinth of folders one can navigate through to find matches for their expression (Project)

When code is all affect, no computer instructions. Works by Sophie Brueckner (Project)

Like regular Linux, but your first typo deletes your drive (Project)

A new online literary journal publishes computational poems written for the Web, connecting Oulipo's study of constraint systems with the explicit size limits of demoscene. Taper asks programmer-poets to construct pieces that fall under a challenging size limit and that address the issue's chosen theme (Project)

Draw your code with an MSPaint-friendly Turing Machine (Project)

Messing with tokens to maximize the minimalism of brainfuck (Project)

A literary esolang written in Classical Chinese (Project)

A chapbook of minimal code pieces engaging with the oddest and most elegant aspects of assembly (Project)

The Most Compact of Zip Bombs, and File Size as Performance (Project)