Editing Esoteric programming language (section)

==History==
[[File:Hello World INTERCAL.png|thumb|"[["Hello, World!" program|Hello World!]]" program in INTERCAL]]
The earliest, and still the canonical example of an esoteric programming language, is [[INTERCAL]],<ref name="software-studies">{{Cite book |first=Matthew |last=Fuller |title=Software studies: a lexicon |date=2008 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-0-262-06274-9 |oclc=1156851190 |url=https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262062749/software-studies/}}</ref> designed in 1972 by [[Don Woods (programmer)|Don Woods]] and James M. Lyon, who said that their intention was to create a programming language unlike any with which they were familiar.<ref name="Raymond1996">{{cite book|author=Eric S. Raymond|title=The New Hacker's Dictionary|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&pg=PA258|year=1996|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=978-0-262-68092-9|page=258}}</ref><ref name="woods-lyon-intercal">{{citation|url=https://muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/intercal/intercal.txt |last1=Woods |first1=Donald R. |last2=Lyon |first2=James M. |year=1973 |title=The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual |access-date=2023-05-01 |publisher=Muppetlabs.com}}</ref> It [[parody|parodied]] elements of established programming languages of the day such as [[Fortran]], [[COBOL]] and [[assembly language]].

For many years, INTERCAL was represented only by paper copies of the INTERCAL manual. Its revival in 1990 as an implementation in [[C (programming language)|C]] under [[Unix]] stimulated a wave of interest in the intentional design of esoteric computer languages.

{{anchor|FALSE}}

In 1993, Wouter van Oortmerssen created FALSE, a small [[stack-oriented programming language]] with syntax designed to make the code inherently obfuscated, confusing and unreadable. Its compiler is only 1024 bytes in size.<ref name="Wouter">{{cite journal |title=Interview with Wouter van Oortmerssen |journal=Esoteric.codes |url=https://esoteric.codes/blog/interview-with-wouter-van-oortmerssen |date=1 July 2015 |access-date=1 May 2023}}</ref> This inspired Urban Müller to create an even smaller language, the now-infamous [[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 best-supported esoteric programming languages, with canonical examples of minimal [[Turing tarpit]]s and needlessly obfuscated language features. Brainfuck is related to the [[P′′]] family of [[Turing machine]]s.