How do I run different esoteric programs?

Question

I was looking online and i found a cool list of esoteric languages. How would I run these? http://listverse.com/2011/02/17/top-10-truly-bizarre-programming-languages/

Obviously, each language have its own program, but how do I run it?

Answer 1

It's true you can individually search and download the compiler/interpreter required, and all other associated baggage whenever you want to try a different language. I highly recommend playing around with them online first to get acquainted though, and then committing if you like it.

There's a great site called TIO and, according to their homepage:

TIO hosts 260 practical and 420 recreational programming languages, for a total of 681 languages.

To get a sense of the cornucopia of languages waiting at your fingertips, you need only see this screenshot. Note that this is with only recreational languages selected and showing:

There's still 2/3 of the page full of recreational languages left to scroll through!

Cheers!

Answer 2

Well as for any programming language, you need an interpreter or a compiler :)

for example you can run brainfuck there => http://copy.sh/brainfuck/

++++++++++
[                   
   >+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-
]
>++.                      
>+.                       
+++++++.                 
.                         
+++.                    
>++.                      
<<+++++++++++++++.        
>.                      
+++.                     
------.                   
--------.                
>+.                      
>.    

Then you have to search it for your target "esoteric" language :) and like any program compiler may require specific systems.

Answer 3

Well, you're taking things a little bit backwards. Your computer executes only machine code.

For you to run programs of any other language other than machine code, you need to have some infrastructure in place to do so. Usually that infrastructure is either a translator (commonly known as a compiler) or an interpreter (or sometimes, a hybrid approach, as in the case of Java or C#).

The aforementioned infrastructure, in language parlance, is called a language implementation.

Now, for the esoteric languages you mentioned, provided you have some implementation of the language at hand (either installed on your computer or somewhere online perhaps, be it a compiler or an interpreter), then you can use it to either translate the programs all the way down to machine code, or use the interpreter (if the language provides one) to interpret the program (as in the case of Python or Ruby).