Esolang:Featured languages

Featured languages are showcased on the main page. Languages are proposed by users of this wiki, and selected to be featured by an administrator; the previous featured language section is then archived on this page. All featured languages are members of Category:Featured languages. To find out more information about the selection process, or to propose a language yourself, see Featured languages/Candidates.

April–September 2013
Deadfish is a very odd interpreted programming language created by Jonathan Todd Skinner. Deadfish has a way to output things but it has no way to input them! It has only a few commands, only four in total. It is also case-sensitive, and can deal only with integer values when adding or subtracting, however once squared this number increases greatly! As you've probably assumed deadfish was created in less then a hour, and can be very useful in creating highly interactive programs[sic]. Deadfish was originally going to be called fishheads as programming in this language is like eating raw fish heads. However, due to the limiting features of the language, programming in this language became like eating (and having to smell) dead, rotting fish heads, an experience not often generally considered pleasurable.

February–March 2013
Emmental is an esoteric programming language invented by Chris Pressey, in which every command can be redefined via giving it a new definition, specified as an Emmental program. Because Emmental has no other method of flow control, redefining commands is required to even perform simple tasks such as writing loops (most simply via redefining a command to execute itself). This was recently proven to be sufficient power for the language to be Turing-complete.

November 2012–January 2013
Malbolge is an esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead, intended specifically to be as hard to program in as possible (unlike most esoteric languages, which are typically difficult to program in only as a side effect of their main goals). This is mostly achieved via having commands change into other commands when executed, together with the only control flow being a computed jump. When it was first released, computer search was the only known way to write programs in it, although it has since been cryptanalysed, with useful loops and a 99 bottles of beer program being developed.

May–October 2012
Glass is a stack-based esoteric programming language invented by Gregor Richards. It is an object-oriented language, including classes, methods and instances, and encourages the use of these features by encapsulating most typically-fundamental features, such as arithmetic, into methods of classes. The result requires extensive juggling of a main stack, similar to Forth, combined with heavy object-orientation. No other language that the author knows of is implemented like this, because it would be idiotic.

March–April 2012
/// is a minimal esoteric programming language invented by User:Ihope127 in which all computation is performed by string substitution. The only operation is to replace a fixed source string with a fixed replacement string, using the syntax. Despite this, it still manages to be Turing-complete, as proved by Ørjan Johansen in 2009 with the construction of a Bitwise Cyclic Tag interpreter in the language, the last in a series of successively more elaborate programs.