--Woods and Lyon, The Intercal Reference Manual

The Turing Tarpit

It occured to me one day in late April of 1997 that there is no page on the net that exists for the explicit purpose of showing off cyberlinguistic horrors such as Intercal and Kvikkalkul as a collection. What you see here is my attempt to remedy that situation. The original Turing Tarpit (officially known as the Bad Languages Page until a very poorly advertised name change) was posted at my website at Boston College, and as of this writing is still there thanks to the benign neglect of its sysadmin Stefan. In August of 1999, I began to bring it over to a Geocities site, where you can find it now.

Sadly, I do have the credentials to do this; though I never bothered to learn the languages covered on this page, I'm the one responsible for the PowerMac port of Kvikkalkul, which you can find at the InfoMac archive or its mirrors. And now: the chamber of horrors...

WARNING!!!

• Intercal--The Plan Nine from Outer Space of programming languages. May not quite be the worst, or the ugliest, but it's the standard setter for bad. If you follow no other link on this page, you must follow this one.

• Magenta, a sort of parody of Ada, was basically designed by committee in 1995 on alt.folklore.computers and specified by me. It's no better than any of the other garbage on this page, and in fact has yet to be implemented. This is probably a Good Thing. Anyway, some of its best features never made it into the spec, and looking back on this whole weird mess four years later, I don't understand a damn thing I wrote. Implementors are still welcome, but I think there's a good shot that someone will put an eye out.

• Cat's Eye Technologies--The only known source for the following languages:
  • Befunge--a language with two-dimensional control flow that someone somewhere appropriately described as "a cross between Forth and Lemmings". Befunge is actually a truly demented sort of entity all its own, having come to rival Intercal for sheer bizarreness as well as popularity in these circles; in fact, in its current incarnation, Funge-98, it is actually multidimensional and not at all limited by the original 24x80 torus program space (some kind of bizarre abstraction called Lahey-space; don't ask, I don't know). (The interesting thing is that it has been reimplemented more than Intercal; there is even an implementation of Befunge-93 that runs on the same virtual machine that Infocom used for their text adventures.)
  • Smetana -- A language whose precise nature I can't quite decipher (or make any sense of at all), Smetana seems to be built on the idea of recursive paradox (doing something that can't be done repeatedly) or something like that. My main interest in it is that smetana is, in addition to being a semi-common Slavic name, also Russian for sour cream. (Once you've figured out Chris Pressey's "algorithm that won't fly", maybe you'll understand it. Maybe.)
  • Brainf***--The ultimate in Turing Tarpits, this language has a total of eight commands, yet can (in a stunningly tedious manner) do virtually everything any other programming language can do. (I have chosen to censor the name of the language, as it seems in this day and age of pageslammers and censorware it might cause my hard work to disappear into the ether. That would be a Bad Thing, worse than having the f-word out in public on my page.) There are other pages related to this language (created as an experiment in creating the world's smallest compiler), including a language called DoubleF*** that allows macro processing and a few other features. (Someone has even written an optimizing BF compiler that doesn't require you to do lots of tedious addition. A bit scary.) This seems to have become one of the most popular Tarpits out there; there are even at least two Brainf***.NET implementations out there (Gerson Kurz' Python compiler and Simon Harris' C/DotGNU implementation.
  • ILLGOL -- ILLGOL (for which I provided a review on Chris' page) is an impressively twisted, two-faced language, a vaguely deranged mix of Perl, Basic, and Fortran that could serve as a useful language... in the 1960s. It is also rather x86 specific. It is also tremendously ugly, and therefore ranks up there with Chris' best work.

  I actually contacted Chris Pressey, the proprietor of Cat's Eye, about resurrecting this page, and he was all for it, so a shout out to him for his help, such as it is. His page also contains a number of other impressively disturbed languages, including Turkey Bomb (half programming language, half drinking game) and Sartre (which has no point). On the whole, it's probably one of the most creative of the pages I reference. Note that it's located now at www.catseye.mb.ca ; Chris is Canadian and has decided that that's something he should advertise a bit more widely. I can't say as I disagree.

  There is a lot of other stuff on the site; I've lost track of the stuff he's cooked up lately. Browse around.

• False--a vaguely Forth-like language named after the creator's favorite boolean value. False's best feature is the addition of lambda closures (aka function definitions to those who are not into the Knights of the Lambda Calculus thing), which earned its creator (a Dutch Amiga hacker named Wouter van Oortmerssen) a truly hysterical letter of condemnation from a few German Forth hackers. This is a link to his own page; there was originally a False page at Cat's Eye, but Chris considers it redundant.

• Bancstar--Funny thing about this one. It seemed to be a joke to me, but Bancstar is very real. I should know because not long after I posted the page I got slapped with a cease-and-desist order from its publishers, who were apparently annoyed with the bad publicity. For the record: I am reposting this page, in defiance of their requests. A proper reading of the page would indicate that it contains no actual Bancstar (should I be calling it BS?) source code, only code that the page's author claims was written in the language. As it stands, it seems like a perfectly ridiculous product that nobody should ever have needed, and if the publishers have a problem with my saying this they can kiss my First Amendment. Serve me again, we'll have a little talk with the ACLU. Thanks to Joe Loughry for providing this page.

• The Unnamed Editor--The author claims this to be based on qed; I'll take his word for it. I find it looks like a cross between teco and JCL, in its own bizarre way.

• pax -- a hyperminimalist functional language, probably the functional equivalent of OISC or something similar. Includes an implementation in Scheme. You can contact the author, Dirk Van Deun, at dvandeun@vub.ac.be.

• Mouse -- Mouse seems to be something of a cross between Pilot and Befunge; it was invented as an embedded systems language in the late seventies and bears all the marks of a typical Tiny Language. This happens to be a link belonging to one Sean Lane Fuller; the language itself was invented by a Canadian CS professor named Peter Grogono, who actually links back to Sean's page from his own.

• The Retrocomputing Museum--Proof that not all linguistic horrors are jokes. You can find sources for Intercal, Kvikkalkul, and several other languages there.

• The Weird Languages Page by Ryan Kusnery, home to the following of Ryan's creations:
  • orthIntercal, a mutation of Orthogonal based on Intercal operators.
  • Bullfrog, a language whose chief conceit has to do with a lack of conditional jumps.
  • reMorse, a language composed entirely of Morse Code.

• Ben Olmstead's home page, which I suspect is a better bad languages page than my original. He has a couple of BF links, as well as a brutal, intractable mess of a language called Malebolge (after one of the circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno) whose chief selling point is that nobody has yet been able to write a trivial version of cat(1) in it. It has a sister language, Dis, that isn't quite so nasty (or do I have the two backwards?)

• Prfnoff's Obfuscated Languages Page (site is an archive -- original link does not work) is a smallish site with links to this page as well as others I've linked to as well. Its main attraction is Fromage, a bf-inspired piece of hackware that according to the author deals with data mostly on the bit level. Like many of its microbrethren, it's written in obfuscated C. Hello, world and cat(1) are included as examples. It is quite certifiably nuts.

• Unlambda -- Created by David Madore at Ecole Normale Superieure in France, Unlambda is unique for being not only sufficently nasty to make this page but for being a functional language as well. The fun part is that it doesn't have a native construct for a lambda closure; you actually have to put two constructs together to do it. Unusually (but appropriately) it's written in Scheme, which is a pleasant and extremely elegant dialect of Lisp that doesn't deserve a place on this page at all.

• Gerson Kurz' website includes an interesting bestiary of things both esoteric and non-esoteric, including a number of odd Python hacks (especially Brainf***.NET and the Great Python Language Zoo).

• Assurdo Technologies (link removed) -- Not strictly a perverse languages site, but still appropriate for the page. Assurdo is the home of perlfs, a system that allows you to write file systems for Linux in Perl, as well as dd/sh. I won't explain dd/sh, but if you know anything about Unix you're headed straight for the big white telephone right now. Anyone who doesn't get it... well, you will. God help you when you do, because I can't. Unfortunately, Assurdo has disappeared; however, PerlFS lives on at SourceForge.

• Waduzitdo -- A small programming language created by someone named Larry Kheriarty back in 1978 in answer to the friends who came over, saw his new computer, and asked, "What does it do?" Right now there's only a spec, and it's not as funny as I tried to make it, but there's an implementation.

For the record, the esolang community has its favorites; Chris Pressey in particular keeps on cranking out his oddities, but Brainf***, Befunge, and lately Unlambda seem to get the most attention.

This site is not a member (web rings make me sneeze), but you might wish to check out The Esoteric Programming Languates ring if you want to see even more esolanging.

Also, the home site of the esolang mailing lists, esoteric.sange.fi, run by Panu Kalliokoski, is on the web, though content is somewhat limited (no home page). Information on joining the mailing list is at Cat's Eye Technologies, where the list used to be before a very amusing Viking funeral involving lots of song lyrics and a Discordian fairy named Jenny.