by Daniel Temkin
21. February 2011 11:43
A new Top 10 Esolangs list was posted to Listverse. It was nice to see my language Velato appear next to some of the old favorites like INTERCAL, brainfuck, and Whitespace. However, like all lists of this type, it emphasizes the jokey side of esolangs. It may seem unfair to pick on a Top 10 List, which is designed to amuse the casual reader, but these lists, which appear about once a year, are often the only time most programmers hear about esolangs. Esolangs come to be identified exclusively as jokey and weird, while more challenging and nuanced work is ignored (as are the more interesting aspects of the languages that do get listed).
My suggestion to improve them would be to focus on languages that are functionally different -- rather than languages whose commands can just be translated to those of another language without loss of meaning. Or at the very least, if they got across an idea of why the languages they do list are interesting. For instance, Shakespeare, Piet, Chef and Velato (four of the ten on Listverse's list) are all languages that encode the program into something else: a scene, an image, a recipe, a piece of music. These tend to get included in such lists because they're easier for the non-programmer to get. But what does it mean for a recipe or a song to be structured by a program written in such a language? What is it like to design such a recipe -- does it actually work or do you end up with something inedible? It would be great to get into a little bit of detail of what the process is like to code something in Chef. Is it a form of cryptography, is it Systems-based art (in the legacy of John Cage), is it simply a joke, or is it all three? What do recipes and programs have in common apart from being lists of instructions? (I'm suddenly inspired to have a Chef-recipe-only potluck and see what comes out of it! And all the music will be Velato programs)
For an example of writing on esolangs that takes a better approach, here's a really fantastic recent post about Fractran (one of my favorite languages) on Good Math, Bad Math. He certainly doesn't deny the deliciously sadistic humor of the language, but also doesn't make that the sole focus of the piece. Instead, he illustrates the elegance of the way Fractran ties together two different systems.