Esoteric programming language
- Not to be confused with the Esolang Wiki.
An esoteric programming language, often shortened to "esolang", is a type of programming language designed for minimalism, exploration of unconventional ideas, brevity, centered around a specific theme, or made as a joke. Typically, esolangs are centered around playing with computation in some way.
A language being unconventional or having esoteric features however does not necessarily make it esoteric. For example, Haskell is not like typical mainstream languages like Python or C++ in that it is functionally pure and flirts with academia a lot, however that does not make Haskell esoteric. Another example would be COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), by today's standards it is very unnecessarily verbose which is a trait of some esolangs such as Yappacino, however it was and is not an esoteric programming language.
Because of the above, some esolangs are instead considered as "weirdlangs" (weird languages) or "esolexicons" (esoteric lexicons) since they are weird on the outside but are normal on the inside. The most popular example of a weirdlang is LOLCODE, which has been argued as non-esoteric since it is just a normal imperative (and even object-oriented!) programming language with funny syntax. The term "esolexicon" also exists to suggest that the language itself isn't esoteric, but the lexicon or syntax is.
