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Languages, platforms, and systems that break from the norms of computing   About esoteric.codes...
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INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS

Posts about individual projects, listed by project name. See the full list of project posts here.
All HTML

Evan Roth's All Html is a structural experiment with a simple premise: a single page containing every single HTML tag in alphabetical order. (Project)

Befunge (25 Years Of)

Some new info and a reconsideration of one of the most influential esoteric languages, at 25 years (Project)

BodyFuck

Making visible the labor of programming (Project)

Checkout

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)

Chef and the Aesthetics of Multicoding

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 journal

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

CodeProfiles

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

Compute

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

Deconstructing Code with Exceptional Texts

Peter Wildman uses the special case of the exception to deconstruct runnability vs non-runnability in code, addressing a still-unresolved debate going back to the beginnings of codework. (Project)

Esopo: Turing Complete Poetry

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

Fetlang

Fetish-based programming (Project)

Gottlob: Write Code in Frege's Concept Notation

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

IBNIZ

An oldschool-style platform bringing demoscene graphics to a new generation (Project)

IDN

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

in:verse

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)

JSFuck

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

Legit and its Quine: Source Control Activity as a Programming Language

The language legit allows a programmer to write code as git activity: branching and merging. Its quine builds on the idea of code about code and reiterates the contentless nature of legit code (Project)

Lenguage

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

Meaning in Mistakes

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

Mimic

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

movfuscator and reductio ad absurdum

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)

Nahee.App

An ongoing Instagram performance by Nahee Kim where code poems, flow-charts, and diagrams express sexuality as automation (Project)

Oak

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

Oou: The Insane Language

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

Open and Shut

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)

PingFS

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

Portrait of a Web Server

Primify

A tool that embeds images into prime numbers (Project)

Reading Club

Reading as Writing, Coding as Public Performance (Project)

regex2fat: Turn Your String Search Pattern Into a Labyrinth of Folders

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)

Singing Code

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

Stack Trace Art

Hiding ASCII art, broken into individual lines deep in source code, to have them emerge as errors cascading through the call stack (Project)

Suicide Linux

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

Taper

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)

Turing Paint

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

VerboseFuck

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

Wenyan-lang

A literary esolang written in Classical Chinese (Project)

xchg rax, rax

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

ZipIt

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

See the full list of posts on individual projects here.
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Created by Daniel Temkin, 2011

Feel free to reach out at contact@esoteric.codes

Except where otherwise noted, all content is released under the CC Attribution 4.0 International license

Esoteric.Codes covers algorithmic theater, computational poetry, conlangs, ephemeral digital performance, disruptive codes, weird hc/i, differential thought platforms, the digital ephemeral, null programs and deletions, unstable linguistics, structure as content, machine disobedience, new relationships between programmers and their primary progeny (bugs), useless machines (Shannon/Minksy), synthetic languages, circuitous systems, constraint sets for coders, paraconsistent calculi, and other platforms, systems, and languages that challenge the conventions of computing. More about the site