Let's write an esoteric language in Ruby!

December 13, 2024 29 min Free

Description

Ever wondered if some programming languages are weird by design? Welcome to the wild and wacky world of esoteric programming languages! The main focus of this talk will be to create a Ruby implementation of the image-based (gif/png/jpeg) language Piet. Can you imagine your source code as a picture of a cow?

Rpiet starts as a naive port of one of the other language implementations of Piet. From there, we consider what is special about this language versus traditional programming languages. We then distill our initial implementation into a lean and mean version which verges on ROFLScale. It even includes a working graphical debugger!