A brief introduction to esoteric programming languages

• hasktran

  2 7 0.0 Haskell

  A compiler for FRACTRAN written in Haskell.

One of my favorite esolangs is FRACTRAN[0], because at first glance it seems impossible to write any programs in, but a little insight from number theory (concerning prime factorization) makes it tractable. I even wrote a compiler for FRACTRAN in Haskell[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN

[1] https://github.com/siraben/hasktran

• Orca

  37 4,428 4.0 JavaScript

  Esoteric Programming Language

  

One recent favorite of these mentioned in the article is ORCA [1], which is really an incredible little thing. It is essentially a live coding environment for generating MIDI you can send into a synth, with some influence from 2D esoteric languages like Befunge.

It's almost unfair to put it on this list, because it's a genuinely cool and fun way to create music, especially if you're inclined to programming. This video [1] shows off the basic idea very nicely. I highly recommend playing around with it if this is the kind of thing you find cool.

[1]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSFrBFBd7vY

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

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