Some programming languages helped send humans to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia drugs, and some exist just to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of just eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, part of the basic “Hello, World” program looks like .<->
Most esolangs don’t even look like computer code at all. Here’s one way to print “HI” in the Shakespeare Programming Language:
All the World’s a Program.
Hamlet, a melancholy prince.
Ophelia, the voice of the machine.
Act: 1.
Scene: 1.
[Enter
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