Daniel Temkin

@rottytooth
376 Followers
95 Following
161 Posts
Logic is utterly alien to human thought and computers are here to remind us of that. https://danieltemkin.com code is art: https://esoteric.codes
Daniel TemkinApr 16
katherineApr 16

Coem in a lovely piece by @rottytooth about natural language esoteric programming :') alongside other wonderful projects!!

https://esoteric.codes/blog/five-esonatlangs

EsoNatLangs Bring the Complexity of Natural Language into Code

The five esolangs discussed in this piece -- Coem, Love Languages, Prāsa, Kip, and Captive -- draw on aspects of natural language usually avoided in code: nuance and ambiguity, complex grammars and morphologies. They stand apart from the better‑known, jokier esolangs like LOLCODE or RockStar, which borrow from natlangs only for their vocabulary, building lexicons of memespeak or power-ballad lyrics, respectively. Since they keep the same grammar as typical imperative languages, there's a stiffness to the way their natural-language-inspired phrases combine and they still feel code-like. These five langs, which we might call esoNatLangs, do not; they foreground linguistic expressiveness over algorithmic execution.

Esoteric.Codes
Daniel TemkinApr 16
joomyApr 16
Kip is featured in a post by @rottytooth about natural language inspired esoteric programming languages! https://esoteric.codes/blog/five-esonatlangs
EsoNatLangs Bring the Complexity of Natural Language into Code

The five esolangs discussed in this piece -- Coem, Love Languages, Prāsa, Kip, and Captive -- draw on aspects of natural language usually avoided in code: nuance and ambiguity, complex grammars and morphologies. They stand apart from the better‑known, jokier esolangs like LOLCODE or RockStar, which borrow from natlangs only for their vocabulary, building lexicons of memespeak or power-ballad lyrics, respectively. Since they keep the same grammar as typical imperative languages, there's a stiffness to the way their natural-language-inspired phrases combine and they still feel code-like. These five langs, which we might call esoNatLangs, do not; they foreground linguistic expressiveness over algorithmic execution.

Esoteric.Codes
Daniel TemkinMar 11
Robin WhittletonFeb 23

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

Daniel Temkin | Forty-Four Esolangs

danieltemkin.com
Daniel TemkinFeb 3
Show threadDaniel TemkinFeb 3

@entropia This expands on my talk Fri night at ZKM, which is a free event starting 6pm.

"What happens when programming languages aim not at functionality and efficiency, but at irritation and reflection, or act like poetry? In his publication »Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code«, published in 2025 by The MIT Press, artist Daniel Temkin brings together so-called esoteric programming languages –radical experiments at the limits of what code can be."

More here: https://zkm.de/en/2026/02/daniel-temkin-forty-four-esolangs

Daniel Temkin: Forty-Four Esolangs

ZKM
Daniel TemkinFeb 1
Show threadJeroenHeijmansFeb 1

Then an extremely fun #FOSDEM talk by @rottytooth about Esoteric Languages 😀

Tried my best to capture it in sketches:

Daniel TemkinFeb 1
Show threadNick MontfortJan 29
@exquisitecorp @kevindc @rottytooth It was up already! https://www.sourcecode-exhibition.softwareheritage.org/
Source Code Exhibition |

Daniel TemkinOct 6, 2025
Mark C MarinoOct 6, 2025

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 TemkinSep 15, 2025
Nick MontfortSep 15, 2025

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

Esoteric Programming Languages: A Unique Challenge

Esoteric languages spark creativity by challenging conventional coding. Daniel Temkin is writing codes to confront the lack of creativity in AI code.

IEEE Spectrum
Daniel TemkinSep 13, 2025
Miguel Afonso CaetanoSep 7, 2025

"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

Esoteric Programming Languages: A Unique Challenge

Esoteric languages spark creativity by challenging conventional coding. Daniel Temkin is writing codes to confront the lack of creativity in AI code.

IEEE Spectrum
Daniel TemkinJun 8, 2025
RIP Bill Atkinson, creator of Hypercard and so much more. Here's a hand-rendered piece using Atkinson dithering from 2020