What's the Most Obscure Coding Language You've Ever Encountered?

Malbolge, anyone? Let's dive into the depths of programming folklore and share our encounters with the most enigmatic, perplexing, and mind-bending languages out there.

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Comments

[Ervin Szilagyi]

Brainfuck, Whitespace, LOLCODE

While these languages where ment to be confusing and hard to read, under the hood they are as simple as you can get. They are essentially state machines. Now, obviously this does not mean that it is simple to write code with them, quite the opposite, but in theory they are as simple as you can get.

A more widely used language which I consider to be esoteric is COBOL. (hot take :D)

There is also a youtube channel who is dedicated to esoteric programming languages: youtube.com/@Truttle1

[Flavius]

LOLCODE is a piece of art.

[Jakub T. Jankiewicz]

Tabloid

Here is example of the code of factorial:

YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS 'This is Factorial'

DISCOVER HOW TO factorial WITH n
RUMOR HAS IT
    WHAT IF n IS ACTUALLY 0
        SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT 1
    LIES!
        SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT
            n TIMES factorial OF n MINUS 1
END OF STORY

EXPERTS CLAIM result TO BE factorial OF 10
YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS result

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There is even an online playground.

[Randall]

Other than meme languages like Brainfuck, the most obscure language I've used was Prolog which we used for a bit in university.

It's a really cool language but it's radically different from typical programming languages, so it's pretty tricky to pick up even if you're already experienced at programming. While most common programming languages are "procedural", Prolog is a "logical" programming language, so it's a whole different paradigm.

Learning Prolog was really fun and I think it can help solidify your grasp of recursion which it tends to use really heavily.

I haven't used it but as I understand it Lisp is quite similar and has more practical uses.

[Siddharth]

There's Piet, which is just pictures. Here's "Hello, World!"

I'd hang this in my bedroom.

There's also Malbolge which is just so evil that I can't explain it. Go read the wiki.

There's Shakespeare, Chef, Befunge, and a lot more.

And one of my personal favourites: ArnoldC

BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SAY PLEASE result15
    TALK TO THE HAND "FizzBuzz"
BULLSHIT
    BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SAY PLEASE result3
        TALK TO THE HAND "Fizz"
    BULLSHIT
        BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SAY PLEASE result5
            TALK TO THE HAND "Buzz"
        BULLSHIT
            TALK TO THE HAND index
        YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR LOGIC
    YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR LOGIC
YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR LOGIC

[Carl Edwards]

NULAN: why? Well, because I wrote it on a Dragon 64 for my own use.
Loosely based on Logo with a bit of reverse polish notation to make it more complicated and with recursion built in.
I used it to create fractals and that was about it.
I would say that makes it pretty obscure - and looking back at it, it is obscure to me right now!

[Ralph Hightower]

APL created by Ken Iverson.

[Paweł Świątkowski]

Definitely Malbolge, although Befunge is also nice.

[Rense Bakker]

We learned OOP concepts in Lingro iirc it was a kind of actionscript/flash thing that literally nobody used in production lol

[Lena]

The rockstar language, it's really obscure to understand what the code does but it is cool to read it and it has a cool backstory: codewithrockstar.com/

[Joe Mainwaring]

The programming language for Texas Instruments calculators