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Ask HN: What are some obscure but interesting programming languages?

3 points by vram22 ↗ HN
Question inspired by an HN thread. IIRC, the recent thread about Simula is the one I am thinking of.

I wanted to say "languages you know (of), but the title length limit was 80 characters.

A more appropriate term for "obscure" may be "less well-known", in this context.

13 comments

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fazkan
brainfuck, APL
jneumann004
I would not say brainfuck is obscure. Definitely esoteric, but it seems like every cs student and junior engineer has at least heard of it. Writing a compiler for it is a great starting project.
yawpitch
Pony, Factor, every descendent of APL.
vram22
Going to try out Factor, and had read about it before.

Saw a video about it recently.

It is a concatenative language, like Forth, which I had tried out some earlier, via GNU Forth, IIRC. But there is more to Factor than just that.

Forth is fun.

Two books about it, by Brodie, are available to download. I have one of them as a hard cover book in a nice dark brown finish.

082349872349872
ABC Charity Esterel FL Fractran GPM Hope Lean MCPL NESL Oz ProTem Рапира rpython Squiggol UNITY USELESS
RicoElectrico
Tcl (inb4 not obscure)

Pawn (used in SAMP)

Or maybe SAKO, an ancient programming language with Polish keywords

BMc2020
I use Autohotkey a lot. Version 2 is tilted heavily towards functions and objects (it began life more command based) so it's more friendly to trad coders now.

Not everyones cuppa tea but it's the language of choice for cheating at games. (Rust is coming up strong though).

lphillips0825
Historical interest: SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") developed at AT&T Bell Labs.
vram22
I had tried out Icon some years ago. Ralph Griswold (who had worked on SNOBOL) and a team, created it. Downloads may still be available. Found it interesting.
simonblack
Pilot.

Lots and lots of assembly languages: 8080, Z80, 6502, 2650, 6800, 68000, 8086, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Pascal is becoming obscure, then there's its offshoot Oberon.

And it's been a very long time since I heard anything about ADA

vram22
Pascal is not really becoming obscure, if you include its dialects and derivatives, like Delphi and Free Pascal. Delphi, though expensive, is still used a lot in companies, particularly in Europe, including Germany.

I was a heavy Turbo Pascal user earlier, did some commercial and hobby work with it, and did some Delphi and FreePascal too.

The speed of operation of the TUI FreePascal IDE (similar to that of the Turbo Pascal IDE) blows IDEs like Visual Studio, IntelliJ,and Eclipse out of the water, after you develop just a little muscle memory for it.

Also, FreePascal binaries are quite small, and comparable to those created by C and D.

I had done a quick test of that a while ago, for small programs.

All were in the range of under 100 KB.

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