44
votes

From a reasonably common programming language, which do you find to be the most mind-bending?

I have been listening to a lot of programming podcasts and taking some time to learn some new languages that are being considered upcoming, and important. I'm not necessarily talking about BrainFuck, but which language would you consider to be one that challenges the common programming paradigms?

For me, I did some functional and logic (for example, Prolog) programming in the 1990s, so I can't say that I find anything special there.

I am far from being an expert in it, but even today the most mind-bending programming language for me is Perl. Not because "Hello World" is hard to implement, but rather there is so much lexical flexibility that some of the hardest solutions can be decomposed so poetically that I have to walk outside away from my terminal to clear my head. I'm not saying I'd likely sell a commercial software implementation, just that there is a distinct reason Perl is so (in)famous. Just look at the basic list of books on it.

So, what is your mind-bending language that promotes your better programming and practices?

7
  • Can't it be mindbending and just leave it at that?
    – user1249
    Jan 7, 2011 at 19:41
  • 4
    Any language where white space matters!
    – mootinator
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:30
  • @mootinator - But Python is actually kind of fun to work with as long as your text editor doesn't cause you pain.
    – rjzii
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:21
  • 1
    @Thorbjorn Is someone going to add INTERCAL? APL is a junior-high school project compared to that big daddy.
    – Mark C
    Jan 9, 2011 at 3:01
  • Perl is nowhere near the hardest. I am 12 years old and I can pretty easily program Perl.
    – Dynamic
    Nov 3, 2011 at 18:43

26 Answers 26

73
votes

APL

This language is incredibly powerful and very terse, it will hurt your brain.

For starters it's tricky to use without a custom keyboard, or at least a keyboard overlay to show up all the obscure symbols it uses.

APL Keyboard

Then the language is of the vector/array-based paradigm and specialises towards complex linear algebra. The original version did not even have loop constructs, anything and everything done by chaining rather unusual array operators together.

  • strip_tags() anybody? (borrowed from Wikipedia)

strip_tags() ala APL

21
  • 18
    +1 for showing the keyboard
    – tcrosley
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:24
  • 5
    @tcrosley: It's nice if you have a real one: wickensonline.co.uk/apl/unicomp-apl-top-large.jpg
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:35
  • 4
    And if it wasn't already mind-bending enough, there were some operators that required using the backspace/overstrike key. For example, matrix inverse was the square box (over the L key) overstruck with a divide sign (the one next to the backarrow key in the upper right corner of the keyboard image).
    – Tangurena
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:37
  • 2
    I'm having flashbacks to the early 1980s when I did APL to do high level statistical regression analysis, people still use that? Shudder.
    – HLGEM
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:59
  • 2
    I did lots of APL once - it still holds a nostalgic spot for me... I loved it at the time. Jan 8, 2011 at 0:28
56
votes

Haskell. It is very close to being purely functional, which most people are not accustomed to; very demanding, which is helpful once you know what you're doing but frustrating until then; has a rather cryptic, highly symbolic syntax, which is great once you know it but opaque before that...the list goes on.

Also, it's simply impossible to format the stuff in a way that looks good to me.

38
  • 7
    I would have said Haskell too, but not because it's cryptic. While it may certainly be difficult to understand, the mind-bending thing is about the theory behind it. Monad and Arrows are still a domain I have not conquered :) Jan 7, 2011 at 19:34
  • 11
    Why "Very close to being purely functional"? It is purely functional. Jan 7, 2011 at 20:03
  • 4
    I'd like to quote myself and add to how Haskell will bend your mind: "Haskell prevents you from shoving things under the carpet, forces you to deal with the structure of your program explicitly, and it teaches you a language to describe these structures: the language of types. Understanding types, particularly rich types as is Haskell, will make you a better programmer in any language." programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/28950/…
    – Waquo
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:29
  • 14
    Haskell is a purely functional programming language. The code you write in Haskell is purely functional (as long as you don't use unsafePerformIO and the like). The IO-Monad is purely functional, if you believe otherwise, you don't understand how monads are used to model control-flow in a purely functional way. Think of your program as a shopping list of IO-actions, with a shopping list being just a pure data structure, no side-effects, and the language runtime being the shopper that performs the side-effects.
    – Waquo
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:35
  • 8
    @Jon, how about, we agree that: Haskell, the language, is purely functional, but it's runtime system is not. The execution of a haskell program is impure, but the program itself is pure. Jan 7, 2011 at 22:32
30
votes

Prolog. It was just so different than any other language I had used when I was first exposed to it. I like it, so I don't hate the syntax or anything.

6
  • 2
    I approached Prolog as reverse programming, wanting to know my answers already and then program to get the questions :)
    – Jé Queue
    Jan 7, 2011 at 19:49
  • 1
    @Xepoch: I think you may be right there, Prolog is formulating the question. One of the only proper 5GL languages in use.
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:07
  • In general I think Prolog is ever so interesting and exceptionally powerful, but I have great trouble getting my head fully around cut placement (!).
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:08
  • +1 for Prolog, I had an artificial intelligence course that used Prolog and that is only the only computer science course that I have done poorly in.
    – rjzii
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:00
  • Prolog isn't a functional programming language though. Being soured on functional by Prolog is like being soured on procedural programming by Lisp. Jan 8, 2011 at 4:57
24
votes

I will agree with you on Perl. It's the most ugly syntax I've ever seen. They say, that even Perl developers cannot remember what they have written the day after.

3
  • 2
    Def +1 on Perl. I was always particularly fond of (I believe they are called) 'implied' variables. Makes for great write-only code. Jan 7, 2011 at 22:31
  • 2
    Everyone writes Perl so differently that they might as well be writing different languages- you don't have to just learn how Perl works to pick up someone else's code in it, you also have to learn how that particular person used it.
    – glenatron
    Jan 8, 2011 at 0:32
  • 3
    Bah to this answer and both comments on it. Well written perl is easy to read and write. Baby-perl written by newbies is simple, if verbose. The only "unreadable" perl is either obfuscated on purpose, or scripting one-liners. Oct 7, 2011 at 14:42
22
votes

I would have to say Forth. The notation that all operations are stack manipulations. In its pure form there are no local variables to use.

7
  • 10
    FORTH is a wonderful language. When I was first learning programming in the early 80s, I had an Atari 400 and my choices were interpreted BASIC, Assembly and FORTH. I used all three extensively, but FORTH more than any other. I still have Leo Brodie's ultra-classic Starting FORTH and Thinking FORTH books. In fact, if I were asked to create a self-hosting language from scratch on a new hardware system, I would choose FORTH without hesitation. Jan 7, 2011 at 19:39
  • 3
    @Adam Crossland: Thinking FORTH is a great book, you might be interested in this link: thinking-forth.sourceforge.net
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:42
  • 1
    @Orbling: great minds think alike. Not more then 10 minutes ago, I put the PDF on my Kindle. Jan 7, 2011 at 20:50
  • 1
    @Adam Crossland: A fine place for it. That book is generally helpful for programmers, should be on the reading list for people - interested in FORTH or not.
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:55
  • 1
    I entirely agree. It has a very great deal to say about how we think about solving problems generally. Brodie is such a lucid thinker and clear writer. His works are a joy to me. Jan 7, 2011 at 21:00
21
votes

Ruby.

This makes me want to kill myself:

1.month.from.now()

(I could have the exact syntax wrong, but you get the point).

21
  • 23
    OMG. Who ever thought this was a good idea? Jan 7, 2011 at 19:59
  • 8
    The mind-bending is not with the reading, it's with the writing. Coming up with this nonsense is difficult, and having to memorize/lookup all the built-in functions/properties is ridiculous. Jan 7, 2011 at 20:23
  • 55
    Is it only me that thinks this looks awesome, and is possibly a good reason to learn Ruby?
    – Orbling
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:37
  • 9
    It is awesome to read, yes. But does this mean I can write 3.months.from.last.month.if.it.was.a.leap.year? No. Or at least, I don't think so. If I can...RoR can be the first telepathic language ever.
    – morganpdx
    Jan 7, 2011 at 20:49
  • 15
    What is wrong DateTime.Now.AddMonths(1);? These features hardly make the code more readable. (I'm not saying C# has the best syntax. You can shift it to any languages conventions and it will still apply.) Jan 7, 2011 at 21:13
18
votes

Brainfuck

Anyone who can honestly write this mockery of a language shouldn't even need a thread like this.

Hello World (pointers, left; explaination, right):

+++++ +++++             initialize counter (cell #0) to 10
[                       use loop to set the next four cells to 70/100/30/10
    > +++++ ++              add  7 to cell #1
    > +++++ +++++           add 10 to cell #2 
    > +++                   add  3 to cell #3
    > +                     add  1 to cell #4
    <<<< -                  decrement counter (cell #0)
]                   
> ++ .                  print 'H'
> + .                   print 'e'
+++++ ++ .              print 'l'
.                       print 'l'
+++ .                   print 'o'
> ++ .                  print ' '
<< +++++ +++++ +++++ .  print 'W'
> .                     print 'o'
+++ .                   print 'r'
----- - .               print 'l'
----- --- .             print 'd'
> + .                   print '!'
> .                     print '\n'
1
  • 2
    Or how about Whitespace? All the evil of Brainfuck combined with invisible code. Jul 3, 2013 at 19:37
17
votes

Lisp is my latest mind-bending language.

I've taken the monads and functional programming from Haskell with me, and now I have macros to work with. I'm just getting into CLOS and haven't touched the condition system at all.

1
  • I don't even like the Lisps (with the possible exception of Clojure -- I still haven't made up my mind there) and gave you a +1. The mind-bending part is certainly there and what I learnt from Lisp, even though I don't use it, informed much of what I do in other languages. Jan 10, 2011 at 6:27
14
votes

MUMPS

This is a language that pops up from time to time in stories online and has the added honor of being in actual production use storing critical life-safety information (that is, patient records). However, this is also a language where terseness is appreciated and functions such as the following might appear in production code (example from the Wikipedia article on the topic):

s A="String" F i=1:1:$L(A) W $c($S($A($E(A,i))<91:$A($E(A,i))-52#26+65,1:$A($E(A,i))-84#26+97))
10
  • wow, you're not joking are you? I didn't oversleep and suddenly it's April 1st? Nothing with that many parentheses and dollar signs should be anywhere near my patient records. Jan 7, 2011 at 21:11
  • 1
    My first ever programming job was with a company that specialized in MUMPS! Sadly I'd done a university course on web development so they put me in company's newly-formed ASP team instead of with the old hands, but MUMPS was the language we were trained in for our first few weeks. Maybe I had a lucky escape... Jan 7, 2011 at 21:52
  • 1
    Anybody that posted here from Madison Wisconsin? Verona, really? Jan 7, 2011 at 22:44
  • 1
    I do believe thedailywtf.com has a whole section dedicated to MUMPS. Doesn't look like a language I'd want to touch.
    – Tyanna
    Jan 8, 2011 at 2:55
  • 1
    I remember learning M in academia, and thinking it was interesting as a special purpose language. The terseness it allows is like a perverse sort of minification. In my naivete, I figured production code would contain little of the language's extreme shorthand. The first and only time I saw a production M codebase my gut tightened... it looked just like your example. Oh, the horror!
    – ajk
    Aug 31, 2011 at 18:20
13
votes

I'd say Coq, or another implementation of dependent type theory. Haskell's type system is not very expressive comparatively. Moving to a more expressive type system (for example, the calculus of constructions (CoC)) allows you to do some neat things, like proving properties of programs within the language, and embedding strong invariants into your types which can be checked statically.

2
  • 2
    Any Dependent Type system/prover/language would probably rate more confusing than the regular languages, so +1.
    – Orbling
    Jan 9, 2011 at 19:36
  • 1
    Formal verification of programs is something I'm just starting out on. It certainly bends the mind and is becoming increasing useful in the real world. +1 Jan 9, 2011 at 21:26
7
votes

Objective-C. To be fair, I only studied it extremely briefly and disliked the syntax at first glance so much that I gave up on it.

Since it is such a (relatively) common language (mainly for Mac/iPhone/iPad development), I'm sure it's actually somewhat decent once you get used to it.

2
  • 2
    Well, it probably does qualify as a bit mind-bending, but I like it. It might help if you realize [foo bar] is just syntactic sugar for objc_sendMsg(foo, "bar"); which in turn looks up the function pointer (it's a special "bar", not a generic one). Did you realize it's fully duck typed? Nov 3, 2011 at 18:32
  • Objective-C is just an enormous syntactic sugar around runtime functions. Once you get used to [receiver doStuff:arg] it looks pretty much like a dynamic java Nov 24, 2013 at 10:39
6
votes

I pick Mercury.

Mercury bent my mind by showing me that even pure languages can do I/O.

The way this works is that I/O functions in Mercury take a 'state of the world' value and return a new 'state of the world' value. So I/O functions in Mercury transform the world and hence purity is maintained.

3
  • 3
    +1 "... mercury transforms the world and hence purity is maintained." - I like that out of context. ;-)
    – Orbling
    Jan 8, 2011 at 1:23
  • I'm struggling through the learning curve with Mercury right now. It's been a worthy struggle so far. I like it a lot. Jan 8, 2011 at 5:02
  • The only thing that put me off mercury was that it's string type is NULL terminated. Jan 8, 2011 at 6:53
6
votes

It has to be Scheme, surely. Trying to explain call-with-current-continuation always hurts my brain, but once you understand it you can make incredibly elegant solutions.

Want to stop part-way through an algorithm and hand control to someone else? Sure!

Want to resume the same continuation several times? Of course!

Want to pause execution of an algorithm, redefine a function, then resume execution with the original stack but an updated global state? No problem! And do this several times with different changes to the global state but the same stack re-entry point? For you, sir, anything!

6
  • +1 LOL + "For you, sir, anything!" Apart from almost being a line in a song in Oliver!, it is also a good aspiration for a language to have.
    – Orbling
    Jan 8, 2011 at 4:53
  • 1
    Scheme is not the only language with explicit continuations. Haskell, for example, supports it just fine and just as mind-bendingly. Jan 8, 2011 at 5:06
  • 4
    It's arguably more mind-bendy in Haskell, since it (call/cc) is implemented as a library and not a language feature. But maybe that makes it less mind-bendy. Jan 8, 2011 at 19:29
  • I think it's simultaneously both more and less mind-bending. Keeping that contradiction in my head bends my mind. So in the end Haskell is more mind-bending. :) Jan 10, 2011 at 6:31
  • The cool thing about Scheme (and Ruby!) continuations is that they are built-in into the language. Haskell basically just adds it's monadic syntax around ordinary continuation passing style, which you can do in Scheme too. But having call/cc built-in everywhere without having to embed the whole thing in a monadic construct definitely allows many mind-bending constructs.
    – Dario
    Jan 26, 2011 at 20:40
4
votes

I used to use an ancient editor called TECO (Text Editor and COmparator), which was a very powerful text modification language, with all sorts of macro capability. I don't remember the exact famous quote about it but the gist was"any random collection of 20 characters is almost always a legitimate TECO program, and will change your file (it is an editor) in a fundamentally unpredicatable manner. I remember writing a Fortran to PL1 converter in about a page of TECO code.

7
  • 5
    "One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse-- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine." Man, those were the days! Jan 8, 2011 at 5:08
  • 1
    TECO was also the original base of EMACS. EMACS started off as just a collection of TECO macros!
    – Gabe
    Jan 8, 2011 at 8:08
  • @Omega: it's necessary to say which TECO you're referring to. DEC TECO, as shipped with TOPS-10, or MIT TECO, the one written in MIDAS. This latter TECO is what EMACS was written in. It's also how EMACS was extended. I used to hack EMACS instead of passing classes. Jan 8, 2011 at 16:18
  • I only used DEC TECO. And yes those were the days (to be young again).... Jan 8, 2011 at 21:14
  • 1
    Makes me remember typing in Vim command mode
    – ron
    Jan 9, 2011 at 18:23
3
votes

Assembly has been the most "mind bending" to me, but I'm just starting it.

4
  • what makes it worse is it is OS & hardware dependent
    – Dave
    Jan 9, 2011 at 18:33
  • What about it makes it so? Straight instructions without explicit grouping order? something else?
    – Jé Queue
    Jan 9, 2011 at 22:45
  • well, in particular, I dislike how unclear the program flow easily turns out to look. It isn't easy to read quickly.
    – Anto
    Jan 9, 2011 at 22:55
  • 2
    Ah, the Cincinnati Milacron 2200B: Variable word length combined with runtime modification of the address of a JMP. It made LSD look tame. Feb 15, 2011 at 3:08
3
votes

Lisp. Learning it is a series of small epiphanies, each of which will totally change the way you think about solving programming problems.

3
votes

REBOL

It's built around the notion of code-as-data, like Lisp is. The language's adherents have a hard time explaining what its unique benefits are over other approaches in that family, and usually wind up shrugging and saying something like "Well the guy who designed the AmigaOS came up with it, the standard library is included and microscopic, and once you 'get' it that will be like taking the red Matrix pill and you'll never want to go back."

The trouble with it is partially that it's quirky and hasn't precisely defined which programmers are its market. But also partially because many of the people advocating it just suck at explaining. :)

But Douglas Crockford used to be a fan, drew some inspiration from it with the creation of JSON, and has suggested people look into it as recently as October, 2010:

"Ted Neward did a really good job of moderating the panel on 'Future of Programming Languages'. At the end of the panel, Ted asked the panelists which languages they though people should be learning in order to get new ideas. The list included Io (Bruce Tate), Rebol (Douglas Crockford), Forth and Factor (Alex Payne), Scheme and Assembler (Josh Bloch), and Clojure (Guy Steele)."

Source: sauria.com

I think it's worth looking at for anyone looking to stretch how they think about language design and extensibility. Now that it's open source (after 18 years of proprietary development) the usual disclaimers I used to give for keeping it at arm's length no longer apply... it's worth a look! The community has even gotten out of their proprietary Rebol-based messaging program and started chatting on Stack Overflow (much to my surprise!)

2
  • 1
    I avoid REBOL because its sole practical implementation is a non-standardized, non-open piece of software that is changed at the whimsy of its owning corporation. (Rebol 2 vs. Rebol 3...) If it is ever standardized or opened I'll be taking another look but until that day Rebol remains off of my toolbelt. Jan 10, 2011 at 6:34
  • 1
    @JUSTMYcorrectOPINION perhaps the day has come to take another look! Rebol 3 is now Apache2 licensed software. We've even got a RebolBot here in the Rebol and Red chat room on StackOverflow to help us with demo'ing the language. (Red is another open source Rebol variant that is showing some very interesting promise as a hybrid compiled version.) Jul 3, 2013 at 5:39
2
votes

I would say from the lengths that many people go to avoid having to directly write it, that developers find SQL to be mind-bending. I guess many people just don't naturally think in terms of sets.

8
  • SQL certainly bends the mind, but it doesn't help me to write better code. Jan 7, 2011 at 21:09
  • 4
    SQL is as natural to me as BASIC, just me. Amazing how easy DB-backed application can be when your grasp full data handling in SQL.
    – Jé Queue
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:19
  • @dan_waterworth, I think SQL can help you writer smaller and more concise code by putting more logic into SQL vs. handling most conditionals and subsequent queries back at the app.
    – Jé Queue
    Jan 7, 2011 at 21:20
  • @Xepoch, I think, if there's anything that the rise of ORMs has taught us, it's that people don't like to write in SQL if they can avoid it. They'd much rather write in their own language. Jan 7, 2011 at 21:25
  • I guess using anything that can write better code than you can is a good thing.
    – JeffO
    Jan 7, 2011 at 22:08
2
votes

Pure

Pure is a functional language based on term rewriting. I like it, it is both sparse and expressive, if a little bit understated.

1
  • +1 Functional means vector, exceptionally powerful language that. As a descendant of q (which owes a bit to APL) and borrowing a ton from Haskell et al. It certainly warrants mention.
    – Orbling
    Jan 8, 2011 at 1:26
2
votes

It might not be the most mind-bending, but it has been by far the hardest for me to learn (I thought Haskell and assembly language were easier!)

That is the set of HDL languages, notably, VHDL (and Verilog to a lesser extent)

Getting over the fact that every "function" runs at the same time is incredibly difficult and you can not avoid the shift to parallelizing absolutely everything. Of course, this is only border-line a programming language though.

3
  • I did a little VHDL once. I had a real epiphany moment when I suddenly realized that, as I was adding code, effectively more and more hardware would appear to implement that code and it was all running simultaneously. Like multithreaded programming with truly unlimited simultaneously executing threads; maybe people with access to unlimited nodes on EC2 or map-reduce clusters get a similar buzz. (But shortly afterwards I came to appreciate what a complete pain it is to implement anything non-trivial in these langauges, and ran away).
    – timday
    Jan 10, 2011 at 20:14
  • 1
    Being electrical engineer I didn't have much problem with the simultaneity, it was quite a liberation in fact. As for the pain of implementation, well the uP is a niche-solution to specific classes of problems that transform the problem to solution that can be described as algorithms, a concept originally taken from mathematics. A problem with inherent parallelism is among the problems easy solvable and VHDL and FPGA's come in handy at that times.
    – user1041
    Mar 17, 2011 at 8:22
  • Yeah, VHDL is freaky if you are not already a programmer and used to working w/ multiple simultaneous blocks.
    – shieldfoss
    Jul 15, 2013 at 14:28
1
vote

Tcl

I started to learn it once, but as I learned enough to make sense I really disliked the way it made my brain feel. That would seem to qualify as mind-bending.

2
  • 1
    I did a lot of Tcl programming around 1995-1997 for no particularly good reason. When I started looking for a new job in 1998, every recruiter in the entire Bay Area tried to get me in to interview for poorly-paid, high-pressure VIGNETTE gigs. I quickly removed it from my resume. I considered giving you a hard time over this, as I remembered Tcl as being really easy, but I kind of wish that I had learned Python instead, in retrospect. Jan 7, 2011 at 20:56
  • Tcl is definitely an acquired taste. Personally I think the design of the language is genius -- no other language fits my brain as well as Tcl does, but I know I'm in the minority. Love it or hate it, learning it requires that you rethink how languages should work. Jun 17, 2011 at 15:52
1
vote

Turing machine language, obviously. It is extremely powerful, provably superior to all other programming languages that exist, and guaranteed to hurt your brain if you try to use it.

7
  • 6
    I have to object to claiming that its provably superior. The term superior suggests bringing subjective issues into account. Also, if we run C on a computer with infinite memory (which is only fair because a Turing machine runs with infinite memory) they are equivalent in power. Jan 8, 2011 at 4:02
  • 2
    @Winston: The tape of a turing machine does not have to be infinite. It only needs to have a tape factory at each end that can manufacture additional tape as needed :) Jan 8, 2011 at 19:43
  • "Provably superior" is by definition an objective term. It means that any language can be implemented on a Turing machine, but not every language can implement a Turing machine. Of course, that's also true for languages like C as well, provided infinite memory and infinite stack.
    – user12667
    Jan 8, 2011 at 21:44
  • BrainFuck as mentioned already in the question, and it's pretty much Turing's machine language.
    – Mchl
    Jan 8, 2011 at 22:27
  • 1
    That shows that a Turing machine is more powerful. The problem is that, at least as I'd use the term, claiming a language to be superior would also take into account ease of use, availability, etc. Jan 9, 2011 at 0:54
1
vote

C

Pointers, memory management and type casting all take a lot of thought and are easy to get wrong. The lack of built-in data structures like hash tables or lists means you either have to devise your own or find a third-party library and learn its API.

2
  • Excuse me. C is an assembly language. Of course it doesn't have those things. Feb 15, 2011 at 3:02
  • 2
    Assembly languages are mind bending.
    – david4dev
    Feb 15, 2011 at 16:39
-1
votes

JESS (Java Expert System Shell). Embedded in a Java environment, this adaptation of CLIPS is a functional rule based expert system language. Trying to map real Java objects as facts and find the right questions to ask to get the results you expect is a real challenge. Less so if you are familiar with expert system theory, but when you are coming from a pure OOP mindset it doesn't fit well. NOTE: CLIPS is not Lisp, but looks like it. Yet another mind bender.

Once you get past the initial learning curve, it is pretty powerful and pretty darn quick to come up with the answers.

2
-1
votes

TeX counts as a language, since it is Turing complete, and I consider it quite mind-bending. A language for typesetting math, (and books on programming)...

-1
votes

CIL

CIL, the Common Intermediate Language that all .NET programs compile to, a kind of an object-oriented assembly. It's interesting for me to try write or read code in it and comparing its constructs to those of C# that I already know. It's a good way to learn more what .NET does behind the scenes. And it can be useful for things like dynamic code generation or rewriting existing compiled code using Mono Cecil.

4
  • 2
    or bytecode for that matter too?
    – Jé Queue
    Nov 17, 2011 at 22:14
  • If you mean Java bytecode, then I have no experience with it whatsoever, so I'm not in a position to recommend it as mind-bending.
    – svick
    Nov 17, 2011 at 22:32
  • I wouldn't really compare Java-Bytecode and CIL, as Java-Bytecode is already compiled and CIL will get compiled at runtime (Just-In-Time-Compiler of .net)
    – basti
    Jul 4, 2012 at 9:25
  • @chiffre Under most circumstances Java Bytecode and CIL work exactly the same. In both cases, you have source code (C# or Java) that gets compiled to a binary intermediary language at “compile-time” (CIL or Java Bytecode), which then gets compiled to actual machine code at “runtime”, by a JIT compiler.
    – svick
    Jul 4, 2012 at 10:25

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