Esoteric Language

A language designed primarily to explore or test the boundaries of programming language design itself, or to satirize conventional language design, rather than for practical software development. Esoteric programming languages are a genuine, long-established category within computer science and language-design culture (the term and its central catalog, the Esolang wiki, date to the early 2000s), typically valued for minimalism, novelty of computational model, or deliberate obscurity rather than for writing production software. Belongs here: Brainfuck, Whitespace, INTERCAL, Malbolge, LOLCODE, Befunge, Piet and Chef, each designed foremost to explore an unusual computational or syntactic idea rather than to be practical. Does not belong here: a general-purpose or domain-specific language that happens to be old, obscure or little used today, filed under the paradigm bucket that actually describes it (Procedural Language for a superseded historical language, for instance), or a language whose primary purpose was genuine practical use even where its syntax is unusual, such as an array language, filed under Array Language.