The website on the billboard hell.co.nz is a pizza place (and notice the phone number – 0800 666 111). I wish there was one nearby as I can just imagine the fun you could have:

“Where are you off to?”
“I’m going to Hell.”

Or:

“Do you want pizza for dinner?”
“Go to Hell.”

Brainfuck
There are 8 commands (one of “< > + - [ ] . ,“) and a single pointer. You gotta admit, that would make for some very small programs! Due to the obscenity of the name, a number of alternatives are used, such as Brainfsck (which has the added benefit of being geeky all on its own).

Whitespace
As you might have gathered from the name, Whitespace is a language composed entirely of whitespace characters: space, tab and line feed. Anything else is considered a comment. This is interesting because it means you can actually have Whitespace programs stored within the source code of another programming language! I’m not sure how well that would work with Python though, since it seems to be very protective of its whitespace and constricts its use.

LOLCODE
LOLCODE is based around the idea of lolcats. The language is an evolving one and seems to accept a great deal of input from users. I think that, even though this language is easier to understand than Brainfuck or Whitespace, you may need to pull your 15 year old sister off of MSN to help you translate some of the expressions.

l33t
Similar to LOLCODE, l33t uses the “speech patterns” of l33t g4m3r5 to form the syntax for the programming language. It’s actually fairly similar to Brainfuck in function. You’d really have to be l33t yourself to have a full appreciation for this one. Maybe you could sit down and have a session of Halo 2 in between hacking?

Visual Basic
Perhaps the most hilarious language listed here, Visual Basic is like a joke that everyone keeps laughing at. Introduced by Microsoft as a prank nearly two decades ago, the language is used everyday, all over the world, by people calling themselves programmers. The original Visual Basic was a way to let people code BASIC “visually” instead of “quickly”, which no-one seemed to like very much, and to allow the programs to run as part of Microsoft’s other long-running joke, Windows. Since the original, Microsoft has kept releasing versions to see how long people will keep using it. Since the release of .Net people seem to have lost their sense of humour so the future of Visual Basic is uncertain at this point.

What’s your favourite esoteric programming language? Any good ones that I missed on this list?