Lambda the Ultimate

I have two real beauties in this category -

1 - The Shakespeare programming language -

http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/shakespeare.html

Yes, you've always wanted this - write your programs in the form of a Shakespearean play ....
Oh, BTW - much of the code in Shakespeare is done as
Shakespearean insults. If you *love* Shakespearean insults then Shakespeare is the language for you.

2 - The Chef programming language

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef.html

Woohoo - write your programs as **recipes** !

Both of these are great - well worth a look.

- obsidian

I've put together various things on BrainFuck, Unlambda, and INTERCAL in my efforts to write the OO shapes example in various languages. BrainFuck is the only one I've completed along those lines - though building a stack, objects, and methods was pure torture. The problem I've had with INTERCAL was determining how to get dynamic dispatch for the polymorphism. And Unlambda becomes quickly unwieldy to do even the most simple of tasks.

For reference, David Madore gives a good description of what qualifies as an esoteric programming language:

[Esoteric] programming languages are typically made nasty by either strongly restricting the set of allowed operations in the language, or making them very different from what programmers are used to, or both.

Personally, I prefer those that rely on restriction rather than those that rely on obfuscation. Along a different line, I think it's just as interesting to see more mainstream languages that can be implemented with a minimal instruction set - Lisp and Forth come to mind.