Esolangs are not designed to catch on. They’re designed to be extremely difficult to use in creative ways.

I once designed an esolang for my CS students to have fun with during the last week of the semester. A few of them used it in really, really creative ways and also went on to make their own languages for fun.

The one I created for class supports supports concurrency, regular expressions, HTTP requests, and file I/O. The challenging part is that every line executes concurrently in round-robin style (one command per line). There are only 8 commands and each line can only store a single string value.

https://austinhenley.com/blog/hofstadter.html

I had a lot of fun in DevDiv!

Your Terms of Use is a white page when I go to it.

I miss Atom.

Newgrounds, Flash games, and Mochi ads are how I got my career started. I miss how easy it was to get your game distributed all over.

I wrote a bit about it: https://austinhenley.com/blog/8lessons8games.html

It was a Microsoft Research project based on OCaml and adapted for .Net.

Discussion last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39401973

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Hyrum’s Law in Golang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201892 - Nov 2024 (183 comments)

Hash Ordering and Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41673295 - Sept 2024 (41 comments)

Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39401973 - Feb 2024 (66 comments)

Git archive generation meets Hyrum's law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631275 - Feb 2023 (76 comments)

Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33283849 - Oct 2022 (52 comments)

Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29848295 - Jan 2022 (36 comments)

Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27386818 - June 2021 (5 comments)

Hyrum's Law: An Observation on Software Engineering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515225 - Nov 2019 (6 comments)

Hyrum's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249199 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

Also relevant, Making a RISC-V Operating System Using Rust (2019). I wonder what relevant Rust features have changes in the last 6 years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36320914

I had an NSF grant for a similar project in 2019. Ask the dev questions about their code and validate their answers using program analysis.

The initial idea was applied to classroom settings.

An Inquisitive Code Editor for Addressing Novice Programmers’ Misconceptions of Program Behavior https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2021ICSE_Inquisitive.pdf