Nothing esoteric about this! VB example, by Terry Freedman

Programming languages are meant to be useful, right? I mean, I didn’t miss a memo or anything? That’s what I thought too. However, I came across a paper discussing esoteric programming languages, or esolangs. I need to read a bit more about these, as I hadn’t heard of them before, but apparently they are languages that have been invented for the purpose of experimentation. Anything useful that you can do with them is purely accidental. You can read more about them here: Esolangs.

(Incidentally, the screenshot shows the front screen of a program I knocked up in Visual Basic circa 1990. It’s basically a souped-up version of the Windows calculator, customised to enable me to work out very quickly how much a new batch of intended purchases would take out of my budget. It was not in the slightest degree esoteric — but it was immensely useful!)

While I was reading the article, I was struck by the similarity between esolangs and Oulipo, a French writing movement in which experimentation, using constraints, is the order of the day. Indeed, Oulipo is an acronym for “Workshop of Potential Literature”. The article then actually mentioned the Oulipo.

The early members of the Oulipo (and some of their ‘descendants’) experimented with using computers to generate text in accordance with sets of rules.

I’ll be teaching a short course (5 hours) on Oulipo, from a creative writing perspective. If you would like to find out more, check this out: Writing the Oulipo: A taster.

In the meantime, I shall be reviewing this book about Esolangs:

Click to see this book on the publisher’s website

Look out for that in my newsletter (see below) and on this website.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Digital Education, our free newsletter. To subscribe to Digital Education, click here: Subscribe.