[HN Gopher] Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously
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Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously
Author : strombolini
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-10-08 09:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (feelingof.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (feelingof.com)
| brudgers wrote:
| Link to the paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15327v1
| tobr wrote:
| Yes. This is a very good podcast. Give it a chance.
| oddthink wrote:
| I'm sorry, it's a really inefficient format. I don't want to
| sit and listen for two hours to what's most likely half an hour
| of content by reading. Just write down what you have to say
| already!
|
| I guess you could do double-speed, but I find that somehow
| stressful.
|
| Edit: I just read the paper. It took me 21 minutes. It's not
| long, only 11 pages.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I don't particularly like the podcast format either, but it's
| not inherently less efficient. You can potentially do other
| tasks while listening to one which would be difficult while
| reading. I personally find it difficult to concentrate on the
| content of the podcast when I do this (I don't take in
| information well from auditory sources), but others don't
| (and some actually find it hard to remember things they
| read).
| distances wrote:
| Same for me. I only can listen to podcasts when I'm folding
| laundry, and my laundry folding needs are limited so it
| takes ages to get through a single episode.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Maybe get into ironing before folding?
| distances wrote:
| That would definitely help with the podcast progression!
| tlavoie wrote:
| I listen to podcasts while walking our dogs. Might not be
| enough for some of these really long episodes, but
| generally enough to know whether I'm going to finish it
| or not.
| dubya wrote:
| I sympathize, but just happened to listen to this episode
| over several days. The discussion actually adds a lot to the
| paper, and they seem very qualified to critique it. One of
| the guests(?) has written several esolangs. There must be a
| way to generate a transcript.
|
| Slight spoiler: they have lots of criticisms of the paper.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe whisper.cpp? Is there a better alternative currently?
| tlavoie wrote:
| That's Lu, one of the regular hosts now. All very bright
| and interesting people, different from each other. I think
| only Jimmy has a formal CS education, but he'll talk as
| much about philosophy sometimes.
|
| Also, show notes link to the paper that they talk about
| that they do like much better.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I really enjoy listening to people talk about things. I get
| the same enjoyment out of talk radio and any news radio that
| is editorialized. I enjoy lots of shows on the various NPR
| member stations.
|
| This format isn't inefficient, you're just judging it based
| having a different goal than it does.
| brudgers wrote:
| For _me_ , podcasts are useful for learning while I drive.
| They are also useful for refreshing my recollection.
|
| Finally the are useful for synthesis...a podcast can talk
| about tenuously related topics that would not usually be
| appropriate for an academic paper; use analogies, metaphors,
| and similes; and simply go off topic and discuss other
| interesting ideas that turn out to be more applicable than
| the formal subject.
|
| But again that's _for me_ , not someone else.
| iFreilicht wrote:
| Could you explain what you like about it? I feel like I'm
| missing something. I've listened to half an hour now and there
| have been a like five minutes of substance, the rest is self-
| references and jarring editing.
|
| If I listen to a podcast I want to learn something, gain a new
| perspective, listen to a well-moderated conversation or at
| least laugh.
|
| This podcast does none of those things. Literally doing nothing
| and letting my thoughts wander is more interesting than
| listening to this.
| Tzt wrote:
| I agree with this. This a remarkably bad podcast. And also
| pretty bad paper to focus on. As the podcast was quite bad, I
| just read it and it was about nothing at all.
|
| Like, it's a basically blogpost that muses about uhhh couple
| examples it pulled at random from esolang wiki and has
| literally no point. Beside prescriptive one. Formatted as a
| paper, which I admit takes some skills.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Fractran is great for emulating quantum computers on classical
| hardware.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance about AI, but had anyone tried a
| "nondeterministic" language that somehow uses learning to
| approximate the answer? I'm not talking about the current cycles
| where you train your model on a zillions of inputs, tune it, and
| release it. I mean a language where you tell it what a valid
| output looks like, and deploy it. And let it learn as it runs.
|
| Ex: my car's heater doesn't work the moment you turn it on. So if
| I enter the car one of my first tasks is to turn the blower down
| to 0 until the motor warms up. A learning language could be used
| here, given free reign over all the (non-safety-critical)
| controls, and told that it's job is to minimize the number of
| "corrections" made by the user. Eventually it's reward would be
| gained by initializing the fan blower to 0, but it might take 100
| cycles to learn this. Rather that train it on a GPU, a language
| could express the reward and allow it to learn over time, even
| though it's output would be "wrong" quite often.
|
| That's an esoteric language I'd like to see.
| senderista wrote:
| OT but I couldn't stop laughing at the very first sentence of the
| transcript:
|
| > One of the biggest goals of this show -- our raisin detour, if
| you will...
| sierra1011 wrote:
| This is as far as I got also, starting me on a tangent of
| whether this is a common misuse or if it was caused by
| something else like auto captioning.
| florians wrote:
| I find it amusing, yet sad, that some here expect a podcast to
| exclusively be a source of information where every second
| delivers bite sized facts. What about entertainment? What about
| engaging with a topic for hours and eventually learn something
| that's not a fact, but a new perspective?
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I am halfway through, been mostly banter. So far the criticisms
| they offered of the paper and ChatGPT apply to their podcast,
| which provides a semi-interesting meta-analysis but has not
| offered much in the way of knowledge, entertainment or
| perspective. It is fairly insufferable if you don't share their
| sense of humor and interest in being random.
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(page generated 2025-10-11 23:01 UTC)