On the topic of esoteric coding, I highly recommend Daniel Temkin's esoteric.codes[0]. It has interviews with esolang creators, essays and more. While you're th

On the topic of esoteric coding, I highly recommend Daniel Temkin's esoteric.codes[0]. It has interviews with esolang creators, essays and more. While you're there, read his short essay "The Less Humble Programmer"[1]. I'm sure it will ring true for many of us: > Practices like esolangs, obfuscated code, one-liners, and code golf are all Less Humble practices. They create spaces for play in code, where it’s okay to use weird hacks, write the unreadable, or stretch the boundaries of programming. > Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has written about how giving up the direct interface with the machine was hard for early programmers. Chun quotes John Backus, developer of FORTRAN about the “black art” of early coding, saying they had a: > “chauvinistic pride in their frontiersmanship and a corresponding conservatism, so many programmers of the 1950s began to regard themselves as members of a priesthood guarding skills and mysteries far too complex for ordinary mortals. Languages like FORTRAN opened up this world to people who were not trained in this black art.” > In a sense, alternative coding practices recreate this sense of code as an esoteric knowledge. Here not in a chauvansitic way, but with a sense of excitement in breaking new ground within deliberately obscure rules offered by an esolang or a set of code golf constraints. Each esolang creating a unique means of communicating with the computer that make sense only to esoprogrammers willing to bypass the niceties of mainstream computing. Temkin approaches esolangs through an art crit lens. I think this is a valid one: the best ones make you think about things you take for granted. Just like good modern art does. And if you're lucky, they make you laugh in the process of educating you, like an IgNobel winning science paper. [0] http://esoteric.codes/#_=_ http://esoteric.codes/#_=_ [1] http://esoteric.codes/post/133863781313/the-less-humble-programmer http://esoteric.codes/post/133863781313/the-less-humble-prog...