The FOC podcast is super fun and they end up discussing a few esolangs from the Forty-Four Esolangs book (Entropy, FatFinger). I'm also on a podcast about the book with Sam Arbseman (author of Magic of Code): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daniel-temkin-on-esote...
Hello sir! I found out about esoteric.codes from FOC a while ago, have read most of what's on there since. Honestly surprised Steve (or early days with Ivan) never had you as a guest / interviewee. So I'll definitely check this one out. Congrats on what looks like an amazing book, can't wait until I get to read it.
Thank you for bringing an underappreciated corner of computing to people's attention!
Hi, I'm the author. Esoteric.codes is my blog on esolangs in general; the book is a collection of my esolangs in particular.
Also just to note that e.c had been on hold while I focused on the book, but I'm working on new posts, so please send anything new esolang-related my way!
More specifically, The Humble Programmer is about "professionalizing" programming. In the '50s and '60s, programmers justified clever tricks due to the strict constraints of early machines. Dijsktra is saying enough already with that, we need to move to a neutral style and favor clarity above all else, so programmers can understand others' work. Esolangs, which often annihilate readability, give an excuse to show off technical feats that aren't justified in mainstream code, a return to the "Wild West" (as Backus put it) or early computing.
I favored the flexibility of ordering concurrent notes differently in MIDI over having the sheet music uniquely define a program. It gives the programmer more choices in how notes can be combined.
But there could be a default ordering -- I would think reading a chord from bottom to top -- for a piece of music where the score came first and the MIDI representation or performance of that score second.
It's funny you link to Piet; I began Velato by asking what would Piet be as music. Some programs are instantly recognizable as Piet while others are hardly recognizable as such; the language has its own aesthetic and yet programmers bring their own style to its set of visual constraints, all through fairly basic rules. In Velato, all notes are read in relation to a root note that can change between commands, even in the middle of a single chord. That was meant to allow for more choice in how a programmer constructs a piece of music.
