Esolang:Community portal
This page serves as a hub portal for the esoteric programming community.
The esoteric programming community has several means of communication in addition to this wiki (the articles and their associated talk pages). Here are the most important ones:
IRC
The #esolangs IRC channel on Libera.Chat is the official home for real-time discussion for this wiki, with sporadic bursts of activity. You can join without installing an IRC client by using Libera.Chat's official browser client. For Matrix users, the
#esolangs:libera.chat room name should work.
Any changes to this wiki are automatically announced on the channel, which makes it a nice way to keep track of what's new. Please take this into account and use the preview button instead of saving a million individual edits.
Logs of the IRC channel can be found at logs.esolangs.org, as well as codu.org (up to 2016-04), and tunes.org (from 2018-01).
The channel is visited by a large number of bots (some of which come and go), including fungot, HackEso, EgoBot, lambdabot, thutubot, metasepia, idris-bot, myndzi, jconn, j-bot, bfbot, velik, esolangs (irc), zemhill, perlbot.
Brief history. The channel was initially established as #esoteric on the freenode network. Its official birthday is 2002-12-09. The channel moved to the Libera.Chat network around the time of "the Great Modern Split" (non-standard term) / Freenode internet drama of 2021-05. It also got renamed to the more descriptive #esolangs at the same time. The logs.esolangs.org site hosts logs for both channels; other locations may or may not follow suit.
Other real-time discussion communities
The Esolangs Discord server is a large, active and friendly Discord server for the purposes of talking about anything related to esoteric languages and recreational programming. You can join by creating a Discord account and clicking the link above.
esoserver is a small welcoming community of esolangers who discuss esolangs and many other things as well. we have:
- community event
- gradually rotating lemon
- third thing
Compilers and Interpreters Discord
The Compilers and Interpreters Discord server is the right place to discuss the practicalities of esolangs and how to implement them. It is also a place to learn about esoteric implementations of serious languages, or even, dare I say it, serious implementations of serious languages. The steps to create a Discord account are the same as above, then click the link.
Usenet
The alt.lang.intercal newsgroup (online archive) is used for discussing both INTERCAL and other esoteric languages.
CGCC
Although it was born and bred to be the hub for programming challenges rather than specifically for esolanging, a small community of esolangers has taken root at the Code Golf & Coding Challenges StackExchange, and many of the esolangs on this wiki (especially most of the golfing langs) were created by its users. CGCC also has an official discord server for discussion about golfing and sometimes, esolanging. Esolanging in particular is discussed in The Tarpit. (For older archives see the now frozen chat room.)
LifeWiki
There is a forum thread for esolangs on the LifeWiki forums. There is also another forum thread that is specifically for the 1+ language.
File archive
There is an esoteric file archive of implementations, programs, web sites and other related files.