Folders: a language with no files - esoteric.codes
▻http://esoteric.codes/post/109310541818/folders-a-language-with-no-files
The language Whitespace is written in space, tab, and return, allowing for files with seemingly no content. Most languages ignore whitespace characters (something the creators of Whitespace joked to be ”a great injustice”); Whitespace ignores everything else, meaning programs can hide in the spaces between words in, say, a C program (and likewise we can hide a C program around the spaces of Whitespace), called a polyglot.
Whitespace has always been a favorite of mine, in part because the visual blankness of Whitespace reflects the very immateriality of esolangs themselves. As an open-ended form (just a list of rules, with no implementation necessary), they are conceptual works first, sometimes — but not always — to be embodied in compilers or in programs written for the language. To have one embodied in spaces and tabs — what ordinarily we don’t read as content at all — has a certain beauty.
I created Folders (the first language I made just for this blog) in asking the question “what is more immaterial than an empty file?” My answer was an empty folder. A file has a materiality in the desktop metaphor that a folder doesn’t. We think of a file as a thing; it can hold information or have behaviors. A folder’s value is in its role organizing files and other folders; a set of folders holding only each other, with no files inside, is ridiculous: an organizational structure organizing nothing.
#esolang #folders #whitespace #programming #programmation #programmation_informatique #développement #code #dossiers