5 ms·

Ask HN: What's an interesting, esoteric programming field?

36 points by bazil376 2y ago

jasaedit 2y ago
[flagged]
- bazil376 2y ago
  Was this response generated by an LLM?
  - bhaney 2y ago
    I was thinking exactly the same thing
    - bazil376 2y ago
      Yeah it’s pretty much identical to what ChatGPT spits out. Looks like the comment is removed now.
shpx 2y ago
Reversible computing. The laws of physics are time reversible but our computers aren't. Quantum computers need to be reversible. Debugging might be easier if we could rewind programs. There are reversible programming languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
- tetris11 2y ago
  I always feel I'm missing something every time this is mentioned. Isn't this more of a storage/caching issue than anything to do with quantum? We have emulators where we can record every flipped bit should we wish to. We just don't because of the insane storage requirements, no?
  - mac3n 2y ago
    There's also thermodynamics - the more irreversability, the more energy cost. The lower bound approaches zero cost, for computations that jitter forward and backward, where you apply energy to nudge them more often forward.
  - mac3n 2y ago
    Quantum computations conserve information. If your gates (transformations) don't conserve information, then you'll break the entanglement and superpositions. At the end of a computation, you do this in a measurement to get an answer.
sneed_chucker 2y ago
A few that I'd like to learn about more deeply given the time: 1. Reverse engineering and vulnerability research. Not that much programming in the sense of writing code, but it basically requires you to be deeply familiar with assembly, compiler optimizations, application binary interfaces, and obfuscation methods. It's especially interesting because there are basically two groups that are heavily involved in this work: independent hackers and nation state or adjacent entities (infosec companies, defense contractors, etc). 2. ROM hacking and homebrew. This is similar to reverse engineering, but it's done for more fun reasons. Lots of super interesting work people have done to do things like mod or optimize classic console games, decompile games so they can be recompiled for modern systems, or just learning the development stack of an obsolete console to create new games and software from scratch. It's especially interesting because you tend to have to get into older or more obscure ISAs like MIPS, PPC, or MOS 6502. Check out Kaze Emanuar for some examples. 3. Mainframe computing. It's only esoteric because the hardware and software is largely proprietary and locked down. The Hercules emulator exists though, and IBM lets you run the 30+ year old versions of their Mainframe OSs as a hobbyist without needing to worry about licenses and stuff. The business model sucks, but Mainframes are interesting since they represent a very different paradigm of computing from the now commonplace X86+Linux commodity machines. There's a YouTube channel called moshix which offers pretty accessible long-form information on how to get started hacking around on Mainframe emulators.
mablopoule 2y ago
So, here's a few pointers of things I came across the past few years, and that you might like: === 1: Artifical Chemistries You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry', I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere). [1] http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang-Banzhaf/dp/026202943X https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang... === 2: 'Alchemist' esolang Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago. [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179 === 3: 'Hexagony' esolang Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 [5] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [6] https://hexagony.net/ https://hexagony.net/ === 4: Soviet/Russian programming languages Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'. [7] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behind-soviets-using-prolog-programming-language-for-buran-space-shuttle https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behi... === 5: APL It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9]. [8] https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 (and obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/) === 6: Urbit Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11] [10] https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/ [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462
mac3n 2y ago
I found FPGA programming a mind-bender, coming from conventional (if low-level) programming. In sequential software programming, you avoid computation until you need it. With hardware, if you have the logic to do the computation, you use it. Think of having all expressions always evaluated. Instead of conditional evaluation you select which output you want. This applies somewhat to software on modern processors with abundant functional units (adders, FPUs, load/store units). They're running ahead evaluating as much as possible, then discarding what wasn't selected.
raphlinus 2y ago
Personally, I would say writing compute shaders to do nontrivial tasks like parsing, sorting, and handling data structures. There's a lot of this in Vello. There's a small community of people doing this, which I think will be growing as WebGPU catches on.
ronald_raygun 2y ago
whatever this is https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/how-to-beat-paper-mario-really-fast-by-playing-ocarina-of-time/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/how-to-beat-paper-mar...
- RetroTechie 2y ago
  Speedrun hacking. Very impressive! (the method used in that article's case, that is).
appplication 2y ago
Audio engineering and signal processing. It’s incredible what you can do. From shaping a waveform that sounds just like a snare drum to geolocating SATCOM jammers by detecting signals below the noise floor of common satellite broadcasts. It’s all just different branches of the same application.
markus_zhang 2y ago
Reverse engineering, Malware research, Hacking in general are the things that come into my mind right now.
mikewarot 2y ago
1) Gnu Radio allows you to build signal flow graphs, which are then executed in real time with your hardware. You can even do audio I/O to get an intuition for DSP that just doesn't happen by studying the math. 2) BitGrid is an esoteric computing fabric I've come up with, and wrote an emulator for.[3] It's a grid of 4 bit in and out look up tables, clocked in two phases like the colors of a chessboard. [1]https://www.gnuradio.org/ https://www.gnuradio.org/ [2]https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid [3]https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid
a_tartaruga 2y ago
It's not esoteric to biologists but genetic engineering. Everything is written in assembly and the execution environment is non deterministic and 3 dimensional.
dcminter 2y ago
How about homomorphic encryption? There was a nice write-up & discussion of it the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626
7373737373 2y ago
The demoscene - trying to create (audio)visual experiences with very limited program sizes: https://www.dwitter.net/top/all https://www.dwitter.net/top/all https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php
badpun 2y ago
3d computer vision is very cool. You basically take a bunch of pictures of a scene, or a video shot by camera, and do a 3d reconstruction of such scene. The math behind it is tricky. If you manage to code even the basic reconstruction algorithm, you'll grow immensely in math, and math-related coding along the way (assuming no previous background). On the other hand, the job market for such skills is very limited. This is not a good career track, unless one is willing to relocate to Silicon Valley.

36 points by bazil376 2y ago

jasaedit 2y ago

[flagged]

bazil376 2y ago
Was this response generated by an LLM?
- bhaney 2y ago
  I was thinking exactly the same thing
  - bazil376 2y ago
    Yeah it’s pretty much identical to what ChatGPT spits out. Looks like the comment is removed now.

shpx 2y ago

Reversible computing. The laws of physics are time reversible but our computers aren't. Quantum computers need to be reversible. Debugging might be easier if we could rewind programs. There are reversible programming languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

tetris11 2y ago
I always feel I'm missing something every time this is mentioned. Isn't this more of a storage/caching issue than anything to do with quantum? We have emulators where we can record every flipped bit should we wish to. We just don't because of the insane storage requirements, no?
- mac3n 2y ago
  There's also thermodynamics - the more irreversability, the more energy cost. The lower bound approaches zero cost, for computations that jitter forward and backward, where you apply energy to nudge them more often forward.
- mac3n 2y ago
  Quantum computations conserve information. If your gates (transformations) don't conserve information, then you'll break the entanglement and superpositions. At the end of a computation, you do this in a measurement to get an answer.

sneed_chucker 2y ago

A few that I'd like to learn about more deeply given the time: 1. Reverse engineering and vulnerability research. Not that much programming in the sense of writing code, but it basically requires you to be deeply familiar with assembly, compiler optimizations, application binary interfaces, and obfuscation methods. It's especially interesting because there are basically two groups that are heavily involved in this work: independent hackers and nation state or adjacent entities (infosec companies, defense contractors, etc). 2. ROM hacking and homebrew. This is similar to reverse engineering, but it's done for more fun reasons. Lots of super interesting work people have done to do things like mod or optimize classic console games, decompile games so they can be recompiled for modern systems, or just learning the development stack of an obsolete console to create new games and software from scratch. It's especially interesting because you tend to have to get into older or more obscure ISAs like MIPS, PPC, or MOS 6502. Check out Kaze Emanuar for some examples. 3. Mainframe computing. It's only esoteric because the hardware and software is largely proprietary and locked down. The Hercules emulator exists though, and IBM lets you run the 30+ year old versions of their Mainframe OSs as a hobbyist without needing to worry about licenses and stuff. The business model sucks, but Mainframes are interesting since they represent a very different paradigm of computing from the now commonplace X86+Linux commodity machines. There's a YouTube channel called moshix which offers pretty accessible long-form information on how to get started hacking around on Mainframe emulators.

mablopoule 2y ago

So, here's a few pointers of things I came across the past few years, and that you might like: === 1: Artifical Chemistries You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry', I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere). [1] http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang-Banzhaf/dp/026202943X https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang... === 2: 'Alchemist' esolang Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago. [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179 === 3: 'Hexagony' esolang Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 [5] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [6] https://hexagony.net/ https://hexagony.net/ === 4: Soviet/Russian programming languages Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'. [7] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behind-soviets-using-prolog-programming-language-for-buran-space-shuttle https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behi... === 5: APL It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9]. [8] https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 (and obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/) === 6: Urbit Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11] [10] https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/ [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462

mac3n 2y ago

I found FPGA programming a mind-bender, coming from conventional (if low-level) programming. In sequential software programming, you avoid computation until you need it. With hardware, if you have the logic to do the computation, you use it. Think of having all expressions always evaluated. Instead of conditional evaluation you select which output you want. This applies somewhat to software on modern processors with abundant functional units (adders, FPUs, load/store units). They're running ahead evaluating as much as possible, then discarding what wasn't selected.

raphlinus 2y ago

Personally, I would say writing compute shaders to do nontrivial tasks like parsing, sorting, and handling data structures. There's a lot of this in Vello. There's a small community of people doing this, which I think will be growing as WebGPU catches on.

ronald_raygun 2y ago

whatever this is https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/how-to-beat-paper-mario-really-fast-by-playing-ocarina-of-time/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/how-to-beat-paper-mar...

RetroTechie 2y ago
Speedrun hacking. Very impressive! (the method used in that article's case, that is).

appplication 2y ago

Audio engineering and signal processing. It’s incredible what you can do. From shaping a waveform that sounds just like a snare drum to geolocating SATCOM jammers by detecting signals below the noise floor of common satellite broadcasts. It’s all just different branches of the same application.

markus_zhang 2y ago

Reverse engineering, Malware research, Hacking in general are the things that come into my mind right now.

mikewarot 2y ago

1) Gnu Radio allows you to build signal flow graphs, which are then executed in real time with your hardware. You can even do audio I/O to get an intuition for DSP that just doesn't happen by studying the math. 2) BitGrid is an esoteric computing fabric I've come up with, and wrote an emulator for.[3] It's a grid of 4 bit in and out look up tables, clocked in two phases like the colors of a chessboard. [1]https://www.gnuradio.org/ https://www.gnuradio.org/ [2]https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid [3]https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

a_tartaruga 2y ago

It's not esoteric to biologists but genetic engineering. Everything is written in assembly and the execution environment is non deterministic and 3 dimensional.

dcminter 2y ago

How about homomorphic encryption? There was a nice write-up & discussion of it the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626

7373737373 2y ago

The demoscene - trying to create (audio)visual experiences with very limited program sizes: https://www.dwitter.net/top/all https://www.dwitter.net/top/all https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php

badpun 2y ago

3d computer vision is very cool. You basically take a bunch of pictures of a scene, or a video shot by camera, and do a 3d reconstruction of such scene. The math behind it is tricky. If you manage to code even the basic reconstruction algorithm, you'll grow immensely in math, and math-related coding along the way (assuming no previous background). On the other hand, the job market for such skills is very limited. This is not a good career track, unless one is willing to relocate to Silicon Valley.