Research Problem + Rationale

Traditionally, coding has been stiffly held to certain standards within a false and exclusionary binary system (Gaboury, 2018). Emotion is rejected for logic; inclusion is rejected for superiority; play is rejected for productivity; and feminity and queerness are rejected for cis-hetero-normativity (Gilbert, 2001).

There have been many efforts that have aimed to open up computing to a broader demographic, primarily through two avenues: the broad programming experience and the programming language itself. To start, platforms/communities such as Glitch create much-needed spaces for people, especially those from marginalised backgrounds, to learn and practice coding in a welcoming, accessible, and collaborative environment (Dash, 2018). Narrowing down, we can also see a progression in clarity and accessibility in programming languages throughout computing history, moving from low-level machine code to highly abstracted and accessible languages such as p5.js (p5.js, 2021) and Elm (Elm, 2021).

There has also been great interest and engagement with computing from the humanities and arts, particularly in the field of electronic literature with code poetry or codeworks. Using the syntax and structures of programming languages, code poets deftly adapt these to create human-readable poetic works (Raley, 2002). Furthermore, the field of esoteric or “weird” programming languages, involves the creation of niche languages that play with the norms of computation, such as the “multicoding” languages Shakespeare, Chef, and Piet (Mateas and Montfort, 2005; Temkin, 2020).

This project aims to engage with both issues of increasing access to coding and playing with the poetics of code. By designing an esolang specifically intended to embrace poetics and emotions, I hope to create a more welcoming space for non-traditional coders, as well as open up broadly creative possibilities within computing.