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Discussion on: 20 Intriguing, Unusual, and Goofy Programming Languages

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rrampage profile image
Raunak Ramakrishnan

Have you tried emojicode?

Here's a hello world:

🏁 πŸ‡
  πŸ˜€ πŸ”€Hello World!πŸ”€β—οΈ
πŸ‰

Some trivia on APL and J:

  • It was first created as a notation by Ken Iverson to teach students programming. The first implementation was only done many years afterwards. It required a dedicated keyboard for the mathematical symbols.
  • This demo of APL from 1975 is still so impressive.
  • Iverson later created J with ASCII symbols. Arthur Whitney who later developed K and Q languages wrote a single page of terse C code which became the foundation of J language. Reading that code was mind-bending for me :) .
  • Iverson got a Turing Award for his work on APL and programming language notation. His essay Notation as a tool of thought is a great read.
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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

"...there is nothing new under the sun." [ source ]

Emoji-based languages have existed since at least 2015, it looks like. But I'm glad that emojicode is gaining traction! I love me a good esolang.

APL developers actually had to get specific typewriter balls in the early days (before dot-based and laser printers) if they wanted to print out their source code to share it with other developers.

APL typeball

If you like terse C (or C++) code, you should check out this ray-tracing code that fits on the back of a business card.

I'll definitely check out that paper. Thanks a lot for sharing, Raunak!