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Piet – A programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (dangermouse.net)
152 points by fny on Jan 28, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Some of the sample programs are kind of amazing: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

Hilarious idea.


The Pi calculator text just made me burst out laughing, waking my girlfriend + baby. Still worth it.


There used to be a couple guys that would submit solutions to the qualifying round of the Google Code Jam (the round with the 25-hour time limit) in this language. I think he had to zip a png file containing his program with another file explaining of how to run it in order to submit.


Looks like it was done twice in 2010 (https://www.go-hero.net/jam/10/languages/Piet) and once in 2015 (by me!) (https://www.go-hero.net/jam/15/languages/Piet)

I sorta cheated with an assembler (https://github.com/sl236/Piet) though.


Many more esoteric languages are on the esolang wiki:

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

Enjoy :)


Slightly non technical question about these. After looking at this and BF esolang derivatives, are these esolangs essentially a category of intermediate representations that would be useful for automated software analysis? Given you can encode the language anyway you want (e.g. Ook), and while they aren't efficient for writing and running programs, they are simple, consistent (if large) inputs into an analysis engine. Is this considered a thing?


You're better off going for lambda calculus. Which, admittedly, looks more like an esolang than anything else


Unlambda is an esolang based on this concept



I bet the people who write this language has no concept of "time" in the way they perceive the world, therefore able to time travel freely.


Tangentially related: The Whitespace Programming Language (WP[0], Homepage[1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua... [1] http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/tutorial.html


Taking inspiration from this, my friends and I made a programming language where each program is chess games: https://github.com/VitamintK/Passant




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