Programming Languages You've Never Heard Of
TCThe Coding Sloth@TheCodingSloth · 643K subscribers
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0:00–0:25Hey, check this code out. Sure. What the Let's start with probably the most infamous language on this list, Brainfuck. Yes, that's actually what it's called. It has other names, too. Brain BF, Brainflakes, Brainfsk. Now, my personal favorite is Brainflakes. This language is one of the most famous esoteric programming languages, or as some people like to call them, esolangs, which is a programming language that's designed to experiment with weird ideas,
Structure
Hey, check this code out. Sure. What the Let's start with probably the most infamous language on this list, Brainfuck. Yes, that's actually what it's called. It has other names, too. Brain BF, Brainflakes, Brainfsk. Now, my personal favorite is Brainflakes. This language is one of the most famous esoteric programming languages, or as some people like to call them, esolangs, which is a programming language that's designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke. So, basically, it's useless in a waste of time, but it's cool. Brainflakes was created in 1993 by some absolute madman named Urban Müller. When he made this language, he was a student, and I guess at the time he thought, "Kilobytes for a compiler? Yikes, that's pure bloatware. I can do better than that." And he did. The original compiler for Brain BF was just 296 bytes on the Amiga OS. Müller wasn't satisfied with that. He later improved it to just 240 bytes. That's insane. Nowadays, programs take up all your RAM, and one update is like one gazillion gigabytes. He was inspired by another minimal language called False that had a 1,224-byte compiler, and he thought he could do better. And, as you can tell, he did. The language has exactly eight commands. That's literally it. Any other character is considered a comment and ignored, which means Hello, World looks like this. Yeah. How does this nightmare fuel actually work? Brainfsk basically uses an array of memory cells. They all start at zero with a pointer that can move left and right. There isn't a language
Watch from 0:00specification the original implementation used an array size of 30,000. And this is where those eight commands come into play. Those commands are just for moving the pointer and manipulating these memory cells. I'm not going to explain these eight commands in depth because, huh, I doubt you're going to try this language. But, if there's something you should try, it's Sloth Bytes. Oh, you don't know what Sloth Bytes is? Sloth Bytes is my weekly newsletter where I try to make you a better programmer in about 5 minutes. Optimistic, I know. Every week I share programming advice, news, and interesting articles to make you a better programmer. And the best part? It's free. All you have to do is give me your email. I won't spam you, I promise. Now, even though the programming language only has eight commands, that doesn't make it easy to program in. For example, in order to do something like printing the letter H, you have to use its ASCII value because the language doesn't have a concept of letters or characters, only numbers. H has an ASCII value of 72, so you'd need to increment a memory cell 72 times and then output it. Fun language, right? The Hello World program we saw earlier, that thing is actually using loops to build up the ASCII values more efficiently. Without loops, it would be even longer. We're talking hundreds of plus signs in a row. It's atrocious, I know. It hurts my eyeballs just looking at this. But here's the crazy part, BF is Turing complete. That means theoretically, you could write any program that can be written in languages like Python or Java, which means theoretically, you could create GTA 6 in this language. Eh, no. You're not funny. How about you go
Watch from 1:30Melbolge. Uh, it sounds like my bulge. Melbolge is named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, which is pretty fitting because trying to program in this language is a literal punishment. This is what Hello World looks like. I'm serious. I didn't just smash my keyboard, that's the literal code. This language was created in 1998 by Ben Olmstead, and this guy was an absolute villain. Melbolge was literally designed to be the most difficult language to program. There's no hidden meaning or anything, that's the literal goal. When this language was first released, nobody could figure out how to write a program in it, not even Ben Olmstead himself. It's the Dark Souls of programming languages. And apparently, Ben was feeling quite generous when he made this language because in an interview, he said this, "If I were to make Melbolge in the 2000s, I would definitely make the documentation subtly wrong." What? It took two full years before the first Hello World program appeared, and it wasn't written by a human. A guy named Andrew Cook wrote a search algorithm that basically brute forced its way to Hello World. A program had to be made to program in this language. But why is this language so difficult? How does it work? I'll try my best to explain how this disgusting language works, but I'm most likely going to be wrong because trying to figure out how this works is giving me a stroke. Okay, so you know how all computers are binary, you know, ones and zeros? Yeah, you can throw that in the trash. Malbolge does not do that.
Watch from 3:01So, instead of following every other programming language, and also, you know, how every computer in the world works, Malbolge wanted to be a special snowflake and use a ternary system. So, instead of zeros and ones, we got zeros, ones, and twos. Ooh. Which means for programming, instead of using bits, we now use trits. The more you know. And Malbolge has three registers. You can think of them as three boxes that hold numbers. Register A is the accumulator, register C is the code pointer, and then there's a register D, which is the data pointer. And just like BF, Malbolge only has eight instructions. Jump, output, input, rotate, move, no operation, stop, and the last one is called a crazy operation. Now, Ben didn't call it the crazy operation, the community did, which says a lot. The crazy operation is a trit-wise operation because, remember, we're using trits in this language, and you basically add two numbers. But there's no logic to it. There's no pattern. Ben straight-up says it right here. Don't look for patterns, it's not there. It's just a random table you have to memorize. Great. You know what's my favorite part about the language? The syntax is absolutely useless. Woo! You can't just say, "Oh, I'm going to move to move." It doesn't work like that. That's way too easy. Instead, to actually write code in this language, it has to do math to determine what instruction it'll be. The way the instructions work is they're based on where it is in memory. You have to take the current position of register C and add the value that's stored in that position and then divide it by 94.
Watch from 4:25You'll take the remainder and that remainder will tell you which of the eight instructions to actually run. Make sense, right? Kill me. We're not done yet, by the way. There's one more thing Malbolge does. The language self-encrypts itself. What the Every time an instruction runs, that instruction gets encrypted and turns into a different instruction. This basically means the code is constantly changing as it runs. Oh, that jump command you just calculated? Sorry, it transformed into a rotate command. And then on the next execution, oh, you thought it was a rotate command? What are you, stupid? It's obviously the letter R now. What? That's why programming in this language is so hard. You have to do some math and then you have to decipher this encryption just to run one instruction. This is why it took so long to write Hello, World. Because nobody had the patience to read and understand how this piece of garbage language Anyways, this language does have some weaknesses and it's the only reason why it's possible to even write programs that do anything useful. But even then, it's not worth the difficulty. Don't do it. Please, don't try this language. Don't do it. Now, this next one isn't exactly a programming language, but a programming tool you probably haven't heard of until now. An ADE, which stands for Agentic Development Environment. ADEs are the next generation of developer tools that are going to make any engineer a hundred times more productive and one of the companies pioneering this type of tool is Warp, today's video sponsor. Warp combines the terminal, the IDE, and AI
Watch from 5:55agents into one platform. So, instead of juggling multiple tools, you just need Warp. You get the speed of a terminal while also having AI-powered commands, a full code editor with review panels, file tree, inline editing, and basically everything you'd expect from an IDE. And you also get AI agents that can write code for you, generate terminal commands, and handle all the tedious stuff so you can focus on building. Warp is already the leading development environment for over 700,000 developers at big companies. This isn't some experimental tool. It's what actual engineers are using right now. Warp is free to use, but if you want to upgrade and get more out of it, you can just use the link in the description to get started. Intercal. Intercal stands for compiler language with no pronounceable acronym. What? You get it, cuz you can't pronounce the actual acronym. This language was created in 1972 by two Princeton University students, Don Woods and James Lyon. Intercal is probably the very first esoteric programming language ever made. And this language was meant to be a parody of all the programming languages from the '60s, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, all those fun languages. Don Woods and James Lyon decided to make a language that was unlike every single one of those, and they succeeded. This is what hello world looks like in Intercal. Whoa, it's actually readable.
Watch from 7:25Now, this language is a bit easier compared to the other two languages we've talked about, but it's still a little wonky. For example, instead of using letters for variables, Intercal uses punctuations. And the equal operation in Intercal, it uses this arrow called gets. And Intercal does not have mathematical operations. It doesn't have addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Instead, it has select, mingle, and unary operators. But what I think is the most interesting part about Intercal is the please keyword. If you don't use please enough in your code, the compiler rejects your program for being insufficiently polite. But if you use please too much, it also gets rejected for being excessively polite. You have to use the please command on exactly 1/3 to 1/5 of your statements, or your code won't compile. So not only do you have to write working code, but you also have to have the right amount of politeness. Now, you're obviously thinking about how performant this language is. And let me tell you, a benchmark was ran where it computed prime numbers that were less than 65,536. This is also called the sieve of Eratosthenes. And they compared the results against C.
Watch from 8:40C took less than half a second. Intercal took over 17 hours. Oh yeah, and this language is also Turing complete, which means theoretically you could make GTA Piet. This is Piet. And yes, this is Hello World. Piet is a programming language where your code is literally abstract art. It's named after Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter who pioneered geometric abstract art in the early 1900s. This language was created by David Morgan-Mar, who thought that programming needs a bit more color. So, how does it even work? Every Piet program starts at the top left. And there's an invisible pointer that's called the direction pointer. The direction pointer moves through these pixels, or as Piet likes to call them, codels, because pixels plus code, genius, I know. But a group of these pixels of the same color are called color blocks. The number of pixels inside the color block determines the value. Pretty interesting. Piet uses 20 colors. And the key thing you have to understand is that the commands aren't determined by the colors themselves. They're determined by how the color changes as you move through the program. And these color changes are categorized into steps based on lightness change and hue change. Now, Piet is a stack-based programming language, so a lot of the commands are stack operations, like push and pop. The only colors that don't follow these rules are white and black.
Watch from 9:57They do different things. White blocks are basically empty spaces. They do nothing. The pointer can pass through it and nothing will happen. As for the color black, those are used for walls. The pointer cannot pass through this. If it hits black, it'll bounce off and try another direction, which means in order to end a Piet program, you have to trap the pointer. That's the only way to end a program. Yeah, this language is honestly not that difficult to understand, at least compared to the other languages we've talked about. But, um fun fact, this language is in fact Turing complete, which means Theo Chef. All right, so we've gone from code that looks like paintings. Let's move on to code that looks like a cookbook. That's right, it's the Gordon Ramsay of programming languages. This language was created in 2002 by the same creator of Piet, David Morgan-Mar. Now, here is the original Hello World program in Chef. It's honestly one of the most readable languages here. Every Chef program follows the structure, a title, ingredients, method, and serves. The title, of course, is the name of your program, which for Hello World, the Hello World Souffle. Yum. The ingredients are your variables. The ingredient name is the variable name, and the ingredient quantity is the value of the variable. Liquid ingredients are Unicode characters, while dry or unspecified ingredients will be outputted as numbers. The method is your code. Just like Piet, Chef is a stack-based language, which makes perfect sense for cooking. In order to program in this language, you have to use mixing bowls and baking dishes. Each method in Chef is a stack-based operation. And the last part of a Chef program is serves, which is basically the output. Now, fun fact, someone created an alternative Hello World that's actually edible, and it's called the Hello World Cake with chocolate sauce. This program prints Hello World, and it actually makes an edible chocolate cake when you follow the recipe. And another fun fact, this language is Turing complete, which mean Wait, GTA 6 got delayed? No. Yeah, that was some cool languages. That's all I got. Bye.
Watch from 11:18Full transcript
- 0:00
Hey, check this code out. Sure. What the Let's start with probably the most infamous language on this list, Brainfuck. Yes, that's actually what it's called. It has other names, too. Brain BF, Brainflakes, Brainfsk. Now, my personal favorite is Brainflakes. This language is one of the most famous esoteric programming languages, or as
- 0:20
some people like to call them, esolangs, which is a programming language that's designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke. So, basically, it's useless in a waste of time, but it's cool. Brainflakes was created in 1993 by some absolute madman named Urban Müller. When he made this language, he was a student, and I guess at the time he thought, "Kilobytes for a
- 0:41
compiler? Yikes, that's pure bloatware. I can do better than that." And he did. The original compiler for Brain BF was just 296 bytes on the Amiga OS. Müller wasn't satisfied with that. He later improved it to just 240 bytes. That's insane. Nowadays, programs take up all your RAM, and one update is like one
- 1:02
gazillion gigabytes. He was inspired by another minimal language called False that had a 1,224-byte compiler, and he thought he could do better. And, as you can tell, he did. The language has exactly eight commands. That's literally it. Any other character is considered a comment and ignored, which means Hello, World looks like this. Yeah. How does this nightmare fuel
- 1:22
actually work? Brainfsk basically uses an array of memory cells. They all start at zero with a pointer that can move left and right. There isn't a language specification the original implementation used an array size of 30,000. And this is where those eight commands come into play. Those commands are just for moving the pointer and manipulating these memory cells. I'm not going to explain these eight commands in depth because, huh, I
- 1:44
doubt you're going to try this language. But, if there's something you should try, it's Sloth Bytes. Oh, you don't know what Sloth Bytes is? Sloth Bytes is my weekly newsletter where I try to make you a better programmer in about 5 minutes. Optimistic, I know. Every week I share programming advice, news, and interesting articles to make you a better programmer. And the best part? It's
- 2:04
free. All you have to do is give me your email. I won't spam you, I promise. Now, even though the programming language only has eight commands, that doesn't make it easy to program in. For example, in order to do something like printing the letter H, you have to use its ASCII value because the language doesn't have a concept of letters or characters, only numbers. H has an ASCII
- 2:25
value of 72, so you'd need to increment a memory cell 72 times and then output it. Fun language, right? The Hello World program we saw earlier, that thing is actually using loops to build up the ASCII values more efficiently. Without loops, it would be even longer. We're talking hundreds of plus signs in a row. It's atrocious, I know. It hurts my eyeballs just looking at this. But here's the crazy part, BF is Turing
- 2:47
complete. That means theoretically, you could write any program that can be written in languages like Python or Java, which means theoretically, you could create GTA 6 in this language. Eh, no. You're not funny. How about you go Melbolge. Uh, it sounds like my bulge. Melbolge is named after the eighth circle of hell in
- 3:08
Dante's Inferno, which is pretty fitting because trying to program in this language is a literal punishment. This is what Hello World looks like. I'm serious. I didn't just smash my keyboard, that's the literal code. This language was created in 1998 by Ben Olmstead, and this guy was an absolute villain. Melbolge was literally designed to be the most difficult language to
- 3:28
program. There's no hidden meaning or anything, that's the literal goal. When this language was first released, nobody could figure out how to write a program in it, not even Ben Olmstead himself. It's the Dark Souls of programming languages. And apparently, Ben was feeling quite generous when he made this language because in an interview, he said this, "If I were to make Melbolge in the 2000s, I would definitely make
- 3:50
the documentation subtly wrong." What? It took two full years before the first Hello World program appeared, and it wasn't written by a human. A guy named Andrew Cook wrote a search algorithm that basically brute forced its way to Hello World. A program had to be made to program in this language. But why is this language so difficult? How does it
- 4:10
work? I'll try my best to explain how this disgusting language works, but I'm most likely going to be wrong because trying to figure out how this works is giving me a stroke. Okay, so you know how all computers are binary, you know, ones and zeros? Yeah, you can throw that in the trash. Malbolge does not do that. So, instead of following every other programming language, and also, you know, how every computer in the world
- 4:31
works, Malbolge wanted to be a special snowflake and use a ternary system. So, instead of zeros and ones, we got zeros, ones, and twos. Ooh. Which means for programming, instead of using bits, we now use trits. The more you know. And Malbolge has three registers. You can think of them as three boxes that hold numbers. Register A is the accumulator, register C is the code pointer, and then
- 4:53
there's a register D, which is the data pointer. And just like BF, Malbolge only has eight instructions. Jump, output, input, rotate, move, no operation, stop, and the last one is called a crazy operation. Now, Ben didn't call it the crazy operation, the community did, which says a lot. The crazy operation is a trit-wise operation because, remember,
- 5:14
we're using trits in this language, and you basically add two numbers. But there's no logic to it. There's no pattern. Ben straight-up says it right here. Don't look for patterns, it's not there. It's just a random table you have to memorize. Great. You know what's my favorite part about the language? The syntax is absolutely useless. Woo! You can't just say, "Oh, I'm going to move to move." It doesn't work like that. That's way too easy. Instead, to
- 5:37
actually write code in this language, it has to do math to determine what instruction it'll be. The way the instructions work is they're based on where it is in memory. You have to take the current position of register C and add the value that's stored in that position and then divide it by 94. You'll take the remainder and that remainder will tell you which of the
- 5:59
eight instructions to actually run. Make sense, right? Kill me. We're not done yet, by the way. There's one more thing Malbolge does. The language self-encrypts itself. What the Every time an instruction runs, that instruction gets encrypted and turns into a different instruction. This basically means the code is constantly
- 6:20
changing as it runs. Oh, that jump command you just calculated? Sorry, it transformed into a rotate command. And then on the next execution, oh, you thought it was a rotate command? What are you, stupid? It's obviously the letter R now. What? That's why programming in this language is so hard. You have to do some math and then you have to decipher this encryption just to run one instruction.
- 6:41
This is why it took so long to write Hello, World. Because nobody had the patience to read and understand how this piece of garbage language Anyways, this language does have some weaknesses and it's the only reason why it's possible to even write programs that do anything useful. But even then, it's not worth the difficulty. Don't do it. Please, don't try this language. Don't do it.
- 7:02
Now, this next one isn't exactly a programming language, but a programming tool you probably haven't heard of until now. An ADE, which stands for Agentic Development Environment. ADEs are the next generation of developer tools that are going to make any engineer a hundred times more productive and one of the companies pioneering this type of tool is Warp, today's video sponsor. Warp
- 7:22
combines the terminal, the IDE, and AI agents into one platform. So, instead of juggling multiple tools, you just need Warp. You get the speed of a terminal while also having AI-powered commands, a full code editor with review panels, file tree, inline editing, and basically everything you'd expect from an IDE. And you also get AI agents that can write code for you, generate terminal
- 7:43
commands, and handle all the tedious stuff so you can focus on building. Warp is already the leading development environment for over 700,000 developers at big companies. This isn't some experimental tool. It's what actual engineers are using right now. Warp is free to use, but if you want to upgrade and get more out of it, you can just use the link in the description to get started. Intercal. Intercal stands for
- 8:03
compiler language with no pronounceable acronym. What? You get it, cuz you can't pronounce the actual acronym. This language was created in 1972 by two Princeton University students, Don Woods and James Lyon. Intercal is probably the very first esoteric programming language ever made. And this language was meant
- 8:23
to be a parody of all the programming languages from the '60s, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, all those fun languages. Don Woods and James Lyon decided to make a language that was unlike every single one of those, and they succeeded. This is what hello world looks like in Intercal. Whoa, it's actually readable. Now, this language is a bit easier compared to the other two languages
- 8:43
we've talked about, but it's still a little wonky. For example, instead of using letters for variables, Intercal uses punctuations. And the equal operation in Intercal, it uses this arrow called gets. And Intercal does not have mathematical operations. It doesn't have addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Instead, it has select, mingle, and unary operators.
- 9:07
But what I think is the most interesting part about Intercal is the please keyword. If you don't use please enough in your code, the compiler rejects your program for being insufficiently polite. But if you use please too much, it also gets rejected for being excessively polite. You have to use the please command on exactly 1/3 to 1/5 of your
- 9:29
statements, or your code won't compile. So not only do you have to write working code, but you also have to have the right amount of politeness. Now, you're obviously thinking about how performant this language is. And let me tell you, a benchmark was ran where it computed prime numbers that were less than 65,536.
- 9:51
This is also called the sieve of Eratosthenes. And they compared the results against C. C took less than half a second. Intercal took over 17 hours. Oh yeah, and this language is also Turing complete, which means theoretically you could make GTA Piet. This is Piet.
- 10:12
And yes, this is Hello World. Piet is a programming language where your code is literally abstract art. It's named after Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter who pioneered geometric abstract art in the early 1900s. This language was created by David Morgan-Mar, who thought that programming needs a bit more color. So, how does it even work? Every Piet
- 10:33
program starts at the top left. And there's an invisible pointer that's called the direction pointer. The direction pointer moves through these pixels, or as Piet likes to call them, codels, because pixels plus code, genius, I know. But a group of these pixels of the same color are called color blocks. The number of pixels inside the color block determines the value. Pretty interesting. Piet uses 20
- 10:54
colors. And the key thing you have to understand is that the commands aren't determined by the colors themselves. They're determined by how the color changes as you move through the program. And these color changes are categorized into steps based on lightness change and hue change. Now, Piet is a stack-based programming language, so a lot of the commands are stack operations, like push and pop. The only colors that don't
- 11:16
follow these rules are white and black. They do different things. White blocks are basically empty spaces. They do nothing. The pointer can pass through it and nothing will happen. As for the color black, those are used for walls. The pointer cannot pass through this. If it hits black, it'll bounce off and try another direction, which means in order to end a Piet program, you have to trap the pointer. That's the only way to end a program. Yeah, this language is
- 11:37
honestly not that difficult to understand, at least compared to the other languages we've talked about. But, um fun fact, this language is in fact Turing complete, which means Theo Chef. All right, so we've gone from code that looks like paintings. Let's move on to code that looks like a cookbook. That's right, it's the Gordon Ramsay of programming languages. This language was
- 11:58
created in 2002 by the same creator of Piet, David Morgan-Mar. Now, here is the original Hello World program in Chef. It's honestly one of the most readable languages here. Every Chef program follows the structure, a title, ingredients, method, and serves. The title, of course, is the name of your program, which for Hello World, the Hello World Souffle. Yum. The ingredients are your variables. The
- 12:19
ingredient name is the variable name, and the ingredient quantity is the value of the variable. Liquid ingredients are Unicode characters, while dry or unspecified ingredients will be outputted as numbers. The method is your code. Just like Piet, Chef is a stack-based language, which makes perfect sense for cooking. In order to program in this language, you have to use mixing bowls and baking dishes. Each method in Chef is a stack-based
- 12:40
operation. And the last part of a Chef program is serves, which is basically the output. Now, fun fact, someone created an alternative Hello World that's actually edible, and it's called the Hello World Cake with chocolate sauce. This program prints Hello World, and it actually makes an edible chocolate cake when you follow the recipe. And another fun fact, this language is Turing complete, which mean
- 13:01
Wait, GTA 6 got delayed? No. Yeah, that was some cool languages. That's all I got. Bye.
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