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2026 Participants: Martin Bartelmus * David M. Berry * Alan Blackwell * Gregory Bringman * David Cao * Claire Carroll * Sean Cho Ayres * Hunmin Choi * Jongchan Choi * Lyr Colin * Dan Cox * Christina Cuneo * Orla Delaney * Adrian Demleitner * Pierre Depaz * Mehulkumar Desai * Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal * Koundinya Dhulipalla * Kevin Driscoll * Iain Emsley * Michael Falk * Leonardo Flores * Jordan Freitas * Aide Violeta Fuentes Barron * Erika Fülöp * Tiffany Fung * Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo * Gregor Große-Bölting * Zachary Horton * Dennis Jerz * Joey Jones * Titaÿna Kauffmann * Haley Kinsler * Todd Millstein * Charu Maithani * Judy Malloy * Eon Meridian * Luis Navarro * Collier Nogues * Stefano Penge * Marta Perez-Campos * Arpita Rathod * Abby Rinaldi * Ari Schlesinger * Carly Schnitzler * Arthur Schwarz * Haerin Shin * Jongbeen Song * Harlin/Hayley Steele * Daniel Temkin * Zach Whalen * Zijian Xia * Waliya Yohanna * Zachary Mann
CCSWG 2026 is coordinated by Lyr Colin-Pacheco (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Mark C. Marino (USC). Sponsored by the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (USC), the Transcriptions Lab (UCSB), and the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons (UCSB).
#critcode Tweets
Temkin
Artist: http://danieltemkin.com
Writer: https://esoteric.codes
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@markcmarino, one Sentence on Code Art I went back to repeatedly was this: SENTENCE 6: For any definition of the term "programming language," there is a language that sits on its border. Considering the implicit rules of language de…
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Another element of Rivulet that hadn't occurred to me until very recently is its resistance to AI; something not intended, since it was written really before AI-assisted coding was very good. Esolangs feel like a kind of AI resistance to begin wi…
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The first thing that occurs to me looking at that, since the code is all 8-bit assembly, the comments dominate the code and are the only thing that is highly readable. Compare this to code like that of the Aibo, which has its own operating system, i…
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Why is the existence of this language you are building useful and necessary? There are so many angles of political and aesthetic commentary in that question. We have an assumption of practical usage and a de-emphasis on redundancy and clutter. …
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This is fascinating angle, and one that didn't occur to me in designing the language. The AntiValence dialact is more limited -- probably not Turing Complete, although I can't rule that out. But it can be used for some simple programs. Here's an inf…
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@AlanBlackwell: Livecoders are some of my favorite folks to talk shop with. Like esolangs, sharing the text of code is essential to the work (I'd put both in a general "code art" category, although I realize that term is somewhat contested) -- and m…
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Yes, Prompt 40 invites other possibities for a language, and the choices made in realizing it create a very different feel. My first draft of Valence used a (different) set of eight symbols, with more alternate readings for each, and the order they …
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@martapcampos: Both conceptual art and esolangs, open up a space to question what art and a programming language are, respectively. Yes, and I think this has been part of esolang culture from early on: whether as formal works that use …
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Hi, I'm Daniel Temkin. I'm a computational artist who makes, among other things, esoteric programming languages. I'm excited to discuss my new monograph, Forty-Four Esolangs, in this thread. I also write an esolang blog, esoteric.codes, where I r…
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For a specific example of muddling of code and state, I wanted to bring up Chris Domas's ruductio ad absurdum. Reductio is a "Turing Complete" program whose behavior is entirely determined by the state of outside data when the program begins. Domas …
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Apologies if this is a bit meandering, but here are some thoughts first on Dall-E and WookieScript code aesthetics and then on Ook! and the possibility of WookieScript becoming an actual esolang. What does code look like to Dall-E? Some observati…
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Thanks for these thoughtful responses! @martapcampos: some of them came up with very interesting concepts that couldn't be implemented because we lacked the technical skills One great thing about esolangs is that their raw material …
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Apart from line numbers and, for more recent code, source control commit history, the actual naming of objects, methods, functions tells us much. Often we can look at a piece of code and see what Brian Kernighan called Complexity Creep, where code b…
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I've been thinking a lot about the undefined value in JavaScript. Undefined is what a variable holds when it doesn't yet have a value. Unlike many languages, JS does not throw an error when you use an undefined variable. And you can even do comparis…
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Thanks @Stefano! Piet was a big inspiration. Also, its creator David Morgan-Mar is the same person who created the Chef language mentioned upthread. I interviewed him years ago
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One reason I chose circles here was to evoke the sense of the space the current occupies It definitely reads that way; the 0 and o feel like open and closed, like different states of the same shape. I wonder which characters would you …
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@HarlinHayleySteele: I love this invoking of the analog inside the digital. I'm imagining the mini-spikes where the voltage goes off a little bit, but not enough to turn 0 into o. A change that is invisible to the discretizing force of the digita…
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Were your experiments using GitHub Copilot for code generation? It was the Github Copilot Beta. @jeremydouglass, I hadn't considered your point about how the AI prompt becomes the part of the chain of meaning of code. I'm reminded here of…
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Still mulling over the topic, but wanted to briefly comment on bespoke code (great term btw!) vs Copilot-generated or other generative code. The generative code that I've seen is very similar in (lack of) style to prose from ChatGPT: homogeneous, va…
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@Stefano: I like how the hierarchy of subclasses opens the possibility to further refine our public desires even more specifically: a work self vs a work self in front of a specific coworker perhaps, and how we play at being ourselves differently in…
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@Edmond, a poignant recipe. I wonder if @DanielTemkin could make a version in Chef? For those unfamiliar, Chef is an esoteric programming language where a source text reads as a cooking recipe, very similar in format to what Edmond posted --…
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It could be argued that this is not a Python program at all, given how it breaks from Python syntax not only so frequently, but through repetition: e.g. assignment to string as @jeremydouglass points out, the misuse of type(). It's almost like it's …
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Inform 7 is already so prose-like, the comments flow seamlessly with the code itself. In some places, the comments (like below, lines 258, 262, 266 with the square brackets) read to me as thoughts unsaid, interspersed with these descriptions of l…
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Hi, I'm Daniel Temkin, and this is my third CCSWG. I am thrilled it is that time again, I've I've been missing the energy of this board! I'm an artist who (among other things) makes esolangs: experimental programing languages that explore our rel…
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I appreciate that clarification, @jang; and yes, some demysification is necessary to really appreciate the work.
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This is an absolutely astonishing work. Endoh is committed to keeping the languages in alphabetical order (beginning and ending with Ruby), which means he can't group languages by similarity. According to Endoh, the hardest transitions were Befunge …
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I love how this book is accessible to novice programmers while challenging some of the most fundamental rules of code style -- mainly the pretense that a "neutral" code style is possible. Nearly all of us who learn to code are taught "good coding…
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Ohh this is a fabulous prompt! I've written about programming languages and Yoko Ono and on recipes and code (via the Chef esolang). My piece is a programming language concept rather than a piece of code, but very indebted to Fluxus idea-art and …
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In the Yoruba-based Yorlang, Hello World looks like this:sọpé "báwo ni ayé";. I spoke with the creator of Yorlang and others who have designed Indigenous African programming languages for esoteric.codes here; each have a Hello World in the spoken la…
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Here are a few things that come to mind. Consio seems to be a machine language for a bio-augmented person. Much of the poetic source code is about the body and touches on themes of body-connectedness and gender. My first thought here is Harraway's c…
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@Zach_Mann: Do the colors and tones articulate randomly or is there a pattern I am missing? Seems (mostly) tied to the y coordinate of the cursor, the tones in a pentatonic scale. I found myself seeking out melodies in it, which guided…
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Documentation: The current mindset around inviting contribution or feedback often requires one to learn how to code (in English!). This sets up a false programmer - consumer binary It's wonderful that you mention Wenyan-lang in the intro, an…
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Hi everyone! I'm Daniel Temkin, an artist and researcher based in NYC. I write esoteric.codes, a blog documenting the history of esolangs along with other languages, platforms, and systems that break from the norms of computing. I've learned about s…
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@suttonkoeser said: I'm still thinking about what CCS means or could mean for my practical work as a programmer - it feels orthogonal to the conversations with team members and the goals of well-written, working, maintainable software that we're…
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@patricia_s said: Here's a screenshot of the list of protected domains It's an interesting list of sites, including many popular messageboards. Just noticed that Echo and (several different domains for) the Thing both made the cut, but th…
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According to this paper, An Approach Toward Answering English Questions From Text by Simmons, Burger, and Long (p.361), Protosynthex II was also written in LISP, although it doesn't give a version. I see from the first pdf you posted, @Lesia.Tkacz, …
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@jang said: On cleverness versus "cleverness", the baroque and the downright rococo: topically, there has recently been (another) call to "write boring Haskell" (a quick search here will provide arguments both for and against) - as a reaction aga…
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@jeremydouglass said: Have you considered submitting a few examples such as this to Rosetta Code, e.g. their 99 Bottles of Beer task? They already host examples from a number of esoteric languages. While this JavaScript dialect is implemented as …
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@jeremydouglass said: On the project homepage I was particularly interested in the playful point that the language will "Question forty-five years of advice against expressiveness in the text of code" and the link to Dijkstra's "The Humble Progra…
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@Ignotus_Mago said: FloodNet was developed in 1998 by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group of artists and activists working in the area of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD). FloodNet enabled activists to hold "virtual sit-ins." ...…
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@jeremydouglass said: @Temkin thanks for sharing this! Which Java decompiler did you use? I used CFR 0.148
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@jeremydouglass said: I think it is interesting how the anthropomorphized transactions (the kitties) are articulated in terms of generational reproduction and sexual dimorphism Cryptokitties seems to be of two minds about sexual dimorphis…
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Thanks Paul and Shawné; this is a fascinating project. The context about dds attacks is fascinating, and the controversy around it as an approach for protest. @Ignotus_Mago said: Here we apparently have a list of servers/organizations that …
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@jeremydouglass said: I wonder to what extent it would matter if basic control-flow operators of a language -- such as if, while, for, break et cetera -- were automatically localizable in all major programming languages and replaced during a pre-…
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@jeremydouglass , it's an important point that there are different levels of validation of a language as you've described. Just to summarize: Is its alphabet valid in a string? Can it be used in a variable names? Does the IDE support it (here I'm a…
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I'm very interested in the morphemic aspect. In nearly all programming languages, an identifier would appear as the same token each time; you wouldn't have a plural version, or a different tense for instance.Cree# carrying meaning within these varia…
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@Lesia.Tkacz said: I'm not sure what on line 24 does, but I like how it reflects a programmer's or user's actual language in use; after all, who hasn't periodically sworn at their machine? Yeah, my first thought is that there was a CLEAR…
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Thanks for posting this, I hadn't read it in years but it's a great one, especially about language and gender. I have a lot of questions about his description of Sapir-Whorf; the examples he gives (the future tense and Schadenfreude ones) are so …
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@ebuswell said: In fact, this extratextual activity is deliberately hidden, precisely in order to create the space in which the textuality of the code can come into being. There's something a little sad about the runtime environment getti…
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I love that list of empty programs. Now I know which languages consider zero-byte files valid code
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This reminds me of Pall Thayer's Microcode work Sleep. Modeled on Warhol's film, it's a program that does nothing for eight hours; but of course background processes are active throughout. Zero-byte code is kind of an obsession of mine. I made a …
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Hi, I'll be co-hosting week 2, and am psyched to take part in this year's discussion! I make programming languages where code consists of empty folders, or where data decays over time, or where spelling everything wrong is okay. I believe we are …