Esoteric Programming Languages

An esoteric language is a programming language that has been created for fun, rather than for practical use, and which is designed with some unusual objective in mind.  Esoteric languages are also often known as obfuscated languages, since the unusuality nearly always results in the language being difficult to write and/or read.

Some websites inaccurately define the term "esoteric language" along the lines of "a language designed to be unusable".  In fact, being difficult to work with usually isn't the actual intention of the language designer.  To take a few examples:

• INTERCAL, which may have been the first esoteric language, was designed to be Turing complete while having nothing in common with other languages of the time.
• Brainf*** was designed as a tiny language for which the world's smallest compiler could be built.
• On the other hand, Befunge was designed with the intention of being almost impossible to compile.

Though as an exception, Malbolge really was designed to be difficult to program in, and there are also various joke languages.

A-Z of languages

My own collection of languages:

• Byte Syze – everything is a byte in syze
• Come Here – a language with COME FROM instead of GOTO
• LOLA – Lots Of Lambda Abstractions – a minimalistic functional programming language
• TLWNN – The Language With No Name – because nothing in the language has a name
• More to come one of these days!

Also at this site is an almost-functional Unlambda to D compiler.