4 joke programming languages that actually work

Published Oct 11, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Sydney Butler is a technology writer with over 20 years of experience as a freelance PC technician and system builder and over a decade as a professional writer. He's worked for more than a decade in user education. On How-To Geek, he writes commerce content, guides, opinions, and specializes in editing hardware and cutting edge technology articles. Sydney started working as a freelance computer technician around the age of 13, before which he was in charge of running the computer center for his school. (He also ran LAN gaming tournaments when the teachers weren't looking!) His interests include VR, PC, Mac, gaming, 3D printing, consumer electronics, the web, and privacy. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Research Psychology with a minor in media and technology studies. His masters dissertation examined the potential for social media to spread misinformation. Outside of How-To Geek, he hosts the Online Tech Tips YouTube Channel, and writes for Online Tech Tips, Switching to Mac, and Helpdesk Geek. Sydney also writes for Expert Reviews UK. He also has bylines at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, Tom's Hardware, MakeTechEasier, and Laptop Mag. Programming languages like BASIC, C, Java, Pascal, and so many more exist because it's hard for humans to code in assembly language, and basically impossible to do in pure machine code. High-level programming languages are meant to be the middle road, where humans can still interpret the code, but a compiler can still make half-decent binaries that aren't too inefficient. These four languages, however, do not exist to be helpful. For the most part, they exist as a joke, making some greater point about the arbitrary nonsense each flavor of "real" programming language makes its acolytes go through. And, yet, they are technically real programming languages. It's just that you'd be better off spending your time learning Python. INTERCAL makes politeness part of your code Would you kindly? INTERCAL is somehow short for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym and this one is totally obsessed with polite protocol. Now, when you think about it, "please" and "thank you" are just part of human language protocol, so it sort of makes sense to bring it into a computer language. Not that this was the intention. INTERCAL was created as a parody of 1960s programming languages by Don Woods and James M. Lyon while studying at Princeton University. It's meant to satirize the aspects of those languages they found silly or stupid. INTERCAL has a lot of weirdness, but it's probably best known for the need to use "PLEASE" a lot. If you use it too much, or not enough, the program wouldn't work. Despite all this deliberate effort to make INTERCAL ugly and painful to use, it is in fact a Turing-complete language, so you can write real software with it. However, it's insanely inefficient, taking hours to complete tasks that take fractions of a second in other mainstream programming languages. My colleague Nick Lewis has a nice deep-dive on INTERCAL if you want to give it a go. Malbolge makes working code an achievement The Dark Souls of programming languages Created in 1998 by Ben Olmstead, Malbolge is named after Malebolge, the eighth circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno. It was created to be as hard to use as possible. Practically impossible, if we're being honest. Some of its "features" include using base-three math, and code that alters itself. Basically, Olmstead looked at the tongue-in-cheek difficulty of other esoteric languages like INTERCAL, and decided to push the joke to its utter limit. Apparently, it took two years from its introduction before anyone managed to write a working program in Malbolge, and Olmstead himself has never actually done so, as far as I can tell. Even stranger, that program, which is another "Hello world!" demo, wasn't even written by a human, but generated using an algorithm. Making it a very early example of vibe coding, I guess. Whitespace hides a program in apparently empty space You can't even see this one Most serious mainstream programming languages completely ignore "whitespace" characters. That is, space, TAB, and linefeed. So Edwin Brady and Chris Morris decided to create a programming language that ignores everything except whitespace characters. Funnily enough, this means you can hide a Whitespace program in the white spaces of another application, because it will ignore them. This results in a polyglot file—one that can be understood by two different interpreters without modification. The image you see up there is a graphical representation of a "Hello world!" program, with the blue segments representing TABs and the red representing spaces. Shakespeare makes your variables insult each other Have at thee! In a way, Shakespeare is the opposite of INTERCAL in that there's some insulting language built into it. Here your programs represent a sort of stage play, with characters, scenes, dialog, and stage direction. Characters hold values like variables, while their dialogue performs assignments, arithmetic, and comparisons. In order to address one another, characters must be on the stage at the same time. Positive and negative nouns represent values, and adjectives are modifiers. Which is how you get such a deranged Hello World, taken directly from the creator's GitHub. Vibe coding might have the last laugh It's funny how we've gone from manually programming computers bit-by-bit, to writing assembly code, to high-level languages, and now finally there's a whole AI language bot that sits and listens to what you have in mind, and then does all the coding on your behalf. If you're a hardcore "vibe coder", you might never even see a single line of code the bot makes. All you care about is whether it compiles and "works." Ironically, these joke languages could only have been made by people who have a genuine love and understanding of the art of coding. So, in a way, writing a program in Malbolge might be more sincere than the best vibe-coded software that will ever exist. There are many more esoteric programming languages, and I mean many. Luckily, if you want to go down this infinite rabbit hole, you can find them cataloged on the Esolang Wiki, which usually includes a few example programs to boggle at too.