History
The earliest, and still the canonical example of an esoteric language was INTERCAL, designed in 1972 by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, with the stated intention of being unlike any other programming language the authors were familiar with. It parodies elements of established programming languages of the day, such as Fortran, COBOL, and assembly language.
Early implementations of INTERCAL were tied to the IBM System/360 and an unidentified Atari computer (probably the Atari 2600) and have not survived. For many years INTERCAL was represented only by paper copies of the INTERCAL manual. The language's revival in 1990 as an implementation in C under Unix stimulated a wave of interest in the intentional design of esoteric computer languages.
In 1992, Wouter van Oortmerssen created FALSE, a small stack-oriented programming language, with syntax designed to make the code inherently obfuscated, confusing, and unreadable. It is also noteworthy for having a compiler of only 1024 bytes. This inspired Urban Müller to create an even smaller language, the now-famous brainfuck, which consists of only eight recognized characters. Along with Chris Pressey's Befunge (like FALSE, but with a two-dimensional instruction pointer), brainfuck is now one of the most well-supported esoteric programming languages. These are canonical examples of minimal Turing tarpits and needlessly obfuscated language features; brainfuck's minimality borders on elegant and pure language design; in fact it is related to the P′′ family of Turing machines.
Read more about this topic: Esoteric Programming Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)