ports & esolangs

I actually went to a talk by Nick Montfort about this book last year, so being assigned a chapter from 10 PRINT was really interesting!

Appearance-wise, my favorite port of 10 PRINT is the Unicode Perl port, in which the original disconnected slash marks appear to connect like an angular maze. There are some spacing issues when porting the original code, so the book uses other characters to better approximate the original appearance. Now, there are no weird gaps!

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Esolangs are languages which are kind of designed to be strange, and they help can test the boundaries of programming language design.

My favorite from this list of esolangs is Rockstar because it’s an interesting take on a real-world “language” - the language of rock music. Being able to write “Put the whole of your heart into my hands” and have a computer understand that (and having the ability to write code and lyrics at the same time) is fascinating to me as a musician!