I’ve only read the idea prompts in @rottytooth’s Forty-Four Esolangs so far but they’re genuinely beautiful, and, in an age of LLMs eating the normal, they seem almost transgressively human.

https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs

We're excited to host a book launch with Daniel Temkin, one of the world's leading experts in esoteric programming languages (or Esolangs). 

Book Launch: Forty-Four Esolangs 
with Daniel Temkin @rottytooth
2pm, October 15
Ahmanson Lab (3rd Floor of Leavey)

Sponsored by the Harman Academy, the Dornsife Writing Program, Media Arts + Practice, and the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab

Daniel Temkin’s book Forty-Four Esolangs, coming from the MIT Press on Sep 23 in the Hardcopy series, is reviewed & @rottytooth himself is interviewed in IEEE Spectrum

https://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin

"Have you ever tried programming with a language that uses musical notation? What about a language that never runs programs the same way? What about a language where you write code with photographs?

All exist, among many others, in the world of esoteric programming languages, and Daniel Temkin has written a forthcoming book covering 44 of them, some of which exist and are usable to some interpretation of the word “usable.” The book, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, is out on 23 September, published by MIT Press.

I was introduced to Temkin’s work at the yearly Free and Open source Software Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) event in Brussels in February. FOSDEM is typically full of strange and wonderful talks, where the open-source world gets to show its more unusual side. In Temkin’s talk, which I later described to a friend as “the most FOSDEM talk of 2025,” he demonstrated Valence, a programming language that uses eight ancient Greek measuring and numeric symbols."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin

#Programming #ProgrammingLanguages #FLOSS #OpenSource #Art