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   Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:20 JST Dan Drake 🦆

   The other evening I started reading Daniel Temkin's "44 Esolangs":

   https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs

   I just read the introduction and skimmed a few of the languages.

   In the following eight hours, I thought of three esolangs of my own!

   This book may be slightly deadly to my productivity...

   #programming #esolang

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     Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:16 JST Dan Drake 🦆

     in reply to

     • Marco Antoniotti

     @marcoxa indeed!

     Emacs is a sort of meta-esoteric text editor. It can emulate any other esoteric text editor.

     (...or...can it? My challenge now: think of an amusing esoteric text editor description that emacs can't do. Hrm...)

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     Marco Antoniotti (marcoxa@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:17 JST Marco Antoniotti

     in reply to

     @ddrake not only. They probably *have been* implemented in Emacs. 🥹

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:18 JST Dan Drake 🦆

     in reply to

     ...and what's interesting about thinking about such esoteric text editor behavior is that one realizes many of those ideas could be implemented in emacs.

     #emacs #esolang #esoeditor

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     Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:19 JST Dan Drake 🦆

     in reply to

     Thinking about esoteric programming languages inspired me to imagine...esoteric text editors!

     If you can say "a programming language that [insert some interesting thing]" you can do the same with text editors, right?

     A couple I thought of:

     A text editor that will only write a file to an *existing* file whose contents are very different from the one being edited. I'd call it Clobber.

     A text editor that will save every file as an image -- take, say, the UTF-8 representation of the text, and take 3-byte sequences at a time to write pixels of an image.

     A text editor that will only save a file if the alphabetical text can be interpreted as a sequence of chemical element abbreviations. So it would save "tick" -- titanium, carbon, potassium -- but if the file had "hello" it wouldn't because there's no way to represent the Ls.