Lambda the Ultimate

C’est à dire, Jeanne a placé un commentaire affreux sur ruban. A pretty neat example of double coding, if you ask me.

Saw it mentioned in A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics, an amusing piece of new-media scholarship that reëxamines the notion of beautiful code by surveying a spectrum of weirdo languages ranging from the relatively pleasant (if rather ancient) INTERCAL or Chef to the downright hellish C++ [PDF, 10MB] and Malbolge.

The authors reserve the more conventional term esoteric for such weird (but soon-to-become-dominant) languages as Prolog and ML, and prefer the term weird for such esoteric languages as Brainfuck. The paper builds on earlier attempts to apply the techniques of literary theory to the task of defining programming as an aesthetic practice. Previous such attempts were apparently too narrow in scope, for they failed to explain why anyone would spend years of their life trying to write a program in a language that is best approached as a cryptosystem and whose Turing-completeness remained in question for a few years.