Some programming languages Helped people to send the moon, some cook new leukemia medlines, and some simply exist to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist 'esoteric language' or 'Esolang', consisting of only eight non-alphabetical characters. Esolangs are experimental, Jokey and deliberately difficult to use languages made to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck it looks part of the basic program “Hello, World”.
Most Esolangs don't look at all as a computer code. Here is a way to print “Hi” in the Shakespeare programming language:
The whole world is a program.
Hamlet, a melancholic prince.
Ophelia, the voice of the machine.
Act: 1.
Scene: 1.
[Enter Hamlet and Ophelia]
Ophelia: You are as sweet as the sum of a nice honest, handsome brave peaceful noble lord and a happy soft golden king. Speak your opinion!
Hamlet: you are as beautiful as the sum of flowering beautiful, beautiful beautiful sunny summer day and a delicious sweet delicious rose. You are as beautiful as the sum of yourself and a flower. Speak your opinion!
[Exeunt]
In short, Hamlet and Ophelia are “variables” to which numerical values are assigned. The nouns “Lord” and “King” each have a value of +1, and adjectives such as “Sweet” and “Beautiful” act as multipliers, produce figures that match ASCII characters – “H” for Hamlet and “I” for Ophelia. “Tell your opinion!” Print them.
Esolangs can get loose even more than that. On the Esolang -Wiki you will find a list of at least 6,000 of these Screwball languages and counts. As a Korean I am amused by!, An Esolang that requires that programs are written in grammatically correct Korean. Then there is white space, an invisible language that consists of things such as spaces and tabs. If you feel like more color, Piet (as in Mondriaan), whose “code” consists of 20 colors arranged on a grid and produces programs that look like abstract paintings. Some Esolangs are even 'Turing-Complete', which means that they can theoretically do everything that can do more responsible languages such as C ++ or Python (just like how you could in theory use a letter opener instead of a sushi area to prepare a 12-course Omakase).
But taken together, you start to wonder what all these brain fucks are good for. Playing with them is at the same time fun and annoying, flooded when you are with countless clones, small control variations on existing languages (such as white space but with hooks), and languages only made for its profane hell. In her book Theory of the gimmickThe literary critic Sianne Ngai says that Gimmicks – everything from Duchamp Fountain To Google Glass – I work too little but also works too hard. “They have made minimal efforts, but beg to be noticed. All in all, Gimmicks can be” labor -saving “cheats that skip the hard work needed to create something with real substance.
So: are Esolangs Gimmicks?
We have programmers Always been sick, so it is not surprising that Esolangs emerged early in our history. In 1972, two Princeton -Students, Donald Woods and James Lyon, the Compiler language without a pronuncal (of course) created. It remains one of the most fully detailed ESO-throughout, with a reference manual for 20 pages a parody of IBM documentation with comedy and sadism. Intercal complains if you do not include enough authorities of the keyword, but it also rejects programs if you use the word too much. You will contact a program with please specify.
