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I've found it interesting to learn about arbitrary code languages that no one uses for anything any more or that never had a purpose / never caught on. Obviously there is punch-yourself-in-the-face languages like COBOL that if you use you're just laughed at, then again if you use Malbolge you must be strung out a few miles because NO ONE else is going to even touch that. So here's a thing for you guys. What are your favourite outlandish code languages / what is the coolest thing you have seen done with an outlandish code language. For example, if you don't know Brainfuck ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck ) then imagine beating your skull in with a hammer and then trying to type a line of code. It won't be the same exactly, but that's probably where this idea came from. Or a brain tumor. I was playing with it one day and made a simple calculator that didn't even line up in base 10. In fact I don't think I did it right at all. 2+2 made 246 and as far as I know I have no clue what base that would be.
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 03:47 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 05:09 |
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We (kind of) have a thread about this already: It'd be nice if esoteric languages were more interesting. which has become something of a general esolang thread. Also COBOL is still pretty widely used in banking and stuff, especially in legacy code that they have no real need to update and figure out how to stamp out all of the bugs and special cases again in a new language. e: Brainfuck isn't actually that hard to comprehend if you know what a Turing Machine is and how they work. It's just not practical because of how completely low level it is (you're literally moving the head and making writes with each character of code) Look Around You fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Jun 30, 2014 |
# ? Jun 30, 2014 09:49 |
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If you want a job for life, learn COBOL.
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 10:30 |
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My favorite is the HP-48 calculator languages: RPL and SysRPL, which are inspired by Forth. I used to have print-outs of HP-49g entry points and SysRPL references, and my calculator was all tricked out with custom keybindings and everything. But then I went to college and got a real computer.
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 11:46 |
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Personally my favorite code that no one uses is right here:
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 14:46 |
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I posted this in the esolang thread:quote:I actually like the opposite of esoteric languages better. When the syntax of a totally earnest language enables strange or unreadable code by trying to be too flexible or clever. Or just ill conceived. MUMPS: But it might interest you as well. I'm currently working on writing a fully-functional and user-friendly calculator with code comprised only of commands and their abbreviations (in MUMPS the commands are not reserved words, so you can use the commands and the abbreviations of the commands as variable and function names too and the compiler figures out what you're using by context).
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 20:15 |
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:I posted this in the esolang thread: That seems really cool! I will have to look into it. The idea of this thread isn't for just Esoteric code languages, but languages that are either out of date that someone made something with (like fortran or something similar) or for little known languages that are non esoteric (Like Golang. Never heard of that till last night).
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 22:13 |
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Dommer416 posted:That seems really cool! I will have to look into it. MUMPS is actively used all over finance and healthcare, but it was created and standardized during the 60s and 70s. A lot of the choices made for the language made sense on old mainframes but not so much now. Nevertheless, numerous applications will be coded in it forever because it was the only thing for b-tree based databases back in the day. Hell, the VA has an army of like 6000+ MUMPS coders maintaining their computer systems. Have a wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 23:53 |
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My current favorite that I can't stop telling people about : urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/dill.hoon It's created by neo-reactionary leading light Mencius Moldbug and it's not a joke; it's the way he thinks programming ought to be. The documentation suggests there might even be some interesting theoretical ideas involved, but damned if I'm going to decode the hieroglyphics and one-syllable identifiers to find them.
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# ? Jul 1, 2014 01:13 |
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I cannot believe that "Mencius Moldbug" is a real name and not some villain from Harry Potter.
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# ? Jul 1, 2014 15:41 |
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Pollyanna posted:I cannot believe that "Mencius Moldbug" is a real name and not some villain from Harry Potter. It's not a real name, Curtis Yarvin is the true name.
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# ? Jul 1, 2014 18:16 |
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i cannot believe that "Curtis Yarvin" is a real name and not some villain from L. E. Modesitt Jr.
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# ? Jul 1, 2014 18:23 |
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Gazpacho posted:My current favorite that I can't stop telling people about : urbit quote:4. Registration
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# ? Jul 1, 2014 19:23 |
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Gazpacho posted:My current favorite that I can't stop telling people about : urbit Well thats certainly a new way to program for the Navy.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 12:35 |
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Gazpacho posted:urbit
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 19:35 |
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I get the same sensation from reading about Urbit that I do when reading Codex Seraphinianus. It's like it's from another planet.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 20:08 |
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If you think Urbit is weird, this guy made a kabbalistic version of Hoon which apparently never terminates and requires a large entropy source to perform calculations. or something. https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/commentary%20on%20ax.md
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# ? Jul 5, 2014 05:04 |
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Pollyanna posted:I cannot believe that "Mencius Moldbug" is a real name and not some villain from Harry Potter. Mencius was one of the rulers of Egypt in ancient times (In BCE). He was best known for his use of writing everything down from how he built his buildings to when he shat.
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# ? Jul 5, 2014 17:59 |
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Gazpacho posted:My current favorite that I can't stop telling people about : urbit afaict the actual language is hoon and Urbit refers to the collection of crap around it Really interesting though!
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# ? Jul 7, 2014 06:17 |
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To better illustrate the beautiful power of MUMPS, here's a fever dream I've been cooking up in my boredom time.code:
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# ? Jul 16, 2014 22:18 |
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:To better illustrate the beautiful power of MUMPS, here's a fever dream I've been cooking up in my boredom time. Looks like this begins with a prompt for 2 numbers and a simple arithmetic operation, then keeps the result and prompts for a new number and a new operation.. and repeats. MUMPS is Magical.
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# ? Jul 16, 2014 23:46 |
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detroit posted:Looks like this begins with a prompt for 2 numbers and a simple arithmetic operation, then keeps the result and prompts for a new number and a new operation.. and repeats. Indeed. I plan to eventually figure out a nice function to generate the prompt characters so it's a little harder to guess. M's bit operations are weird, so I haven't come up with an elegant way to hide the match in the select function. I need to pick one of the graybeards' brains about that.
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# ? Jul 17, 2014 02:45 |
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Could you conceivably write a program that would add random valid Brainfuck characters and if it compiles, keep that version and try adding more random valid characters? Repeat this process and you'll have a self-writing program? Seems like it would work well with this language since it has so few valid kinds of input.
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# ? Jul 21, 2014 15:30 |
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LP0 ON FIRE posted:Could you conceivably write a program that would add random valid Brainfuck characters and if it compiles, keep that version and try adding more random valid characters? Repeat this process and you'll have a self-writing program? Seems like it would work well with this language since it has so few valid kinds of input. I mean, hypothetically you could definitely build commands procedurally. The "x [string]" and "d@[string]" both let you execute strings as code in slightly different fashions. It's not commonly used in real applications, for obvious reasons, but nothing stopping you from getting clever with it for fun. I'm just not super strong at creating algorithms that aren't for a specific real-world purpose so I haven't poked at it that much yet. ed: If anyone wants to play with MUMPS, there's an open-source distro called GT.m that is 100% free and you can install it on your machine or in a VM to play around with.
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# ? Jul 21, 2014 15:37 |
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:Indeed. I plan to eventually figure out a nice function to generate the prompt characters so it's a little harder to guess. M's bit operations are weird, so I haven't come up with an elegant way to hide the match in the select function. I need to pick one of the graybeards' brains about that. I think if you just take a null variable and set another variable to not the null variable you'll get 1. From there it's just arithmetic and concatenation to generate any other number. Whenever people used to ask me to write a zr/zl I had an obfuscated binary clock routine that I'd just paste into the email.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 00:57 |
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Duraznos posted:I think if you just take a null variable and set another variable to not the null variable you'll get 1. From there it's just arithmetic and concatenation to generate any other number. Whenever people used to ask me to write a zr/zl I had an obfuscated binary clock routine that I'd just paste into the email. You are absolutely correct on this (for those looking in horror, there's no such thing as a boolean in M, all values that aren't 1 are treated as "false" so <NOT><anything that's not 1> returns 1), but the trick is more that I can't think of a good function that, seeded with 1, returns all the of the characters in my string through repeated calls. If I'm still writing out a bunch of math (rather than a short function), I think it's still too obvious that I'm just generating a prompt.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 17:10 |
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A while back i was making a coding language that was sort of like python, sort of it's own thing. I never posted it anywhere, but I thought I would post it here. I called it MUCK because I couldn't think of a name. --- !open 54-web_qt !enable 54-web_qt ##Fire is what we burn things with $burn 54-web_qt input 66ui1-libct *frame-set VAL=*frame1 $build fort.vbox $build fort1.hbox %fort.vbox label VB1 %fort1.hbox label HB1 ##this presents a window to the code to be built $present [vb1, hb1] POST 1 window @11.Ulibnet4 !open 11.Ulibnet4 !halt 11.Ulibnet4 $^%knet 70 (process)[libnet4{load-on(VB1, HB1)}] $present POST 1 window $change VB1 (input)[uus-loader-45.gz{@/home/[user]/Downloads/<package>}] $present [VB1, HB1] POST 1 window $build window *frame-set=VAL(480x640) (- list to DT1 frame 1 !window show CT1 ~present dbg 54-web_qt !present -PD window end --- $ would be an action, % would import, @ would direct to a certain package that you put in the config file for the code itself as well as be able to point to a specific directory, and ! would spark a process. With the line that starts as $^%, it adds to the package list for the VBOX HBOX window. I can't remember what knet did, but I had tools for the compiler too. Knet, IFBP, and other acronyms lead to tools. You would have to use $, not !. ! starts a system process while $ starts a tool or process in the code itself. It is pretty much a virtual machine but is built in an application. The script pretty much makes a 480x640 window that would have web-qt in it. It was a presentation script that I never really finished and lost interest in. I could probably finish it if I wanted to; I have the files somewhere.
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# ? Aug 27, 2014 18:05 |
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This might be the right thread to ask: have any of you had any experience in using SCI Sierras Creative Interpreter? I'm looking to make an old style Sierra adventure game...it looks like an interesting language but just wanted to know if anyone else had any thoughts on its usage.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 01:07 |
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fliptophead posted:This might be the right thread to ask: have any of you had any experience in using SCI Sierras Creative Interpreter? I'm looking to make an old style Sierra adventure game...it looks like an interesting language but just wanted to know if anyone else had any thoughts on its usage. I used it a little but I decided to just use batch for text based games since it was easier at the time. It might be a better choice now though.
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# ? Sep 9, 2014 21:14 |
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Dommer416 posted:I used it a little but I decided to just use batch for text based games since it was easier at the time. It might be a better choice now though. There are a couple of IDEs floating about which look ok so far (one of them has processing to convert a photo to a 16 colour image which is cool) but I'm having difficulty getting the demo program to run due to 64 bit Windows! Currently looking to go the whole hog and seeing up an old Windows VM to run the IDE in! Installing Win98 was a trip down memory lane...
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# ? Sep 10, 2014 04:40 |
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Dommer416 posted:I used it a little but I decided to just use batch for text based games since it was easier at the time. It might be a better choice now though. I wonder if anyone has ever written an adventure game using lex and yacc. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Sep 12, 2014 |
# ? Sep 12, 2014 01:22 |
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Escher is a "language for programming in metaphors." I haven't been able to work out what it does, but the readme has a bibliography and claims that it was funded by DARPA, so I think it might be real.
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# ? Sep 15, 2014 14:51 |
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blogging enthusiast posted:Escher is a "language for programming in metaphors." I haven't been able to work out what it does, but the readme has a bibliography and claims that it was funded by DARPA, so I think it might be real. It's real! Or someone trolled DARPA. Some of their documentation (see below) makes me think it might be the latter.
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# ? Sep 15, 2014 18:55 |
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blogging enthusiast posted:Escher is a "language for programming in metaphors." I haven't been able to work out what it does, but the readme has a bibliography and claims that it was funded by DARPA, so I think it might be real. That's more for the esoteric thread. This thread is for like HP 108C or whatever those stupid languages were for calculators, or just random code that was official but no one gave a poo poo about.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 00:05 |
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I made this for that 99 bottles of beer website: (MUMPS) code:
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# ? Oct 29, 2014 22:39 |
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:I made this for that 99 bottles of beer website:
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# ? Oct 30, 2014 01:32 |
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I guess if I ever post about Forth again I should do it in here, hunh?
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# ? Nov 4, 2014 02:17 |
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I've written obfuscated Erlang while waiting for planes a few years ago:code:
code:
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# ? Nov 11, 2014 02:59 |
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:I made this for that 99 bottles of beer website: I don't think this'll work, or at least I'm pretty sure that if you try and $C that many times in a set statement you'll break the parser and get a <TXPER> back. That might be version dependent or get through Cache okay, though.
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# ? Nov 11, 2014 13:33 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 05:09 |
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Stelas posted:I don't think this'll work, or at least I'm pretty sure that if you try and $C that many times in a set statement you'll break the parser and get a <TXPER> back. That might be version dependent or get through Cache okay, though. It runs under cache 2013 at least. I don't have any other distros readily available for testing it.
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# ? Nov 11, 2014 21:24 |