In this episode, Samuel Arbesman speaks with Daniel Temkin, a writer and artist working in the digital art space who has been creating strange and provocative programming languages for years. These “esoteric languages” or “esolangs” [esso] explore the limits and breadth of what programming and code can be. Temkin recently released a book collecting languages he created, titled Forty-Four Esolangs, a work that is both wild and fascinating.

Together, Arbesman and Temkin explore the nature of esolangs, the benefits of playful constraints, how to think about programming languages more broadly, code poetry, the balance between the unforgiving and human properties of code, and how Temkin was able to turn these experiments and projects into a book.