It’s a programming language designed for utter incomprehensibility. The best way to some up how crazy it is? after it was introduced it was *two years* before anyone got a working hello world program. They didn’t actually write it. It was generated using a beam search.

Eventually, Malbolge was “solved” (some details are on the wikipedia page mentioned above)

What Malbolge gave me was a bit of an extremely wide view of a programming language. despite how absolutely messed up Malbolge is/was, it is a system of rules for turning input into output. “My” definition of a programming language turned into “a fixed system of rules that given input, produces output, regardless of our understanding of the intermediate steps”.

It’s a pretty loose definition.
it means that I dont consider HTML, XML, or Latex to be “programming languages”
it does however mean that I would consider a system of pipes and valves to be a programming language, or, to stretch the point a bit, “gravity” as it takes an input (initial positions) and produces output (final positions) according to it’s own system of rules.

at least that’s my stock answer to what is a “programming language”

of course, I define “useful programming language” quite differently. (and purposely leave a few off of that list just to irritate the language zealots)

I think we can probably all agree that Befunge isn’t a real programming language.

Also thx for spotting that bug. I’ve been pretty frustrated with this theme, and Wordpress in general lately. My summer project will be to write my own blogging engine.

@Antonio — because at some point COBOL and Fortran were dominating the industry. I can almost guarantee that PHP will become obsolete in our lifetime.

BTW, if it turns out it isn’t your fault, it’s Scriptaculous’s problem, do consider jQuery.

OK, HTML documents in general are a tad difficult to compare with mathematical theories, although I can definitely think of quite a few exceptions right off the top of my head. But they both use a very specific, very precise, syntactically watertight, computer-comprehensible language to describe what they are, without giving any at all specific or precise algorithm for implementation.

As for what problem theories describe, well apart from how to give students headaches, which they are quite adept at, theories describe the problem of how relationships between various axioms (in math) or fundamental laws of nature (in science) give rise to a certain mathematical results (math) or observable phenomenon (science). It’s typically up to the computer or very confused student to figure out how to represent it so that it makes sense to itself, where “making sense” means being able to analyze and draw conclusions from the theory (the computer of course would require very sophisticated imperative programming in order to do so, and the student doesn’t stand a chance anyway).

“well actually” Round 3: Han’s turn

Well actually, Roomba’s mechanical parts can be seen as just a set of physical I/O API’s for whatever imperative programming is built-in to the circuitry.

Roomba’s hardware is obviously instructed by an imperative language. If it’s anything like iRobot Create Kit, then the original is also likely to have been made in C or C-plus-plus. Though I was referring to the robot itself, as a unit, not counting as a programming language of its own. It solves a problem (the programming language inside solves the problem of moving the hardware), but I feel that is an entirely different domain.

Also, although I don’t actually know, I would be very surprised if Roomba wasn’t programmed in an imperative programming language, probably C though it could easily be Self or something.

It seems that we now need to establish just what kind of problems are valid (that is, a Roomba is not a programming language, even though it solves the problem of floors being occupied by dust).