Clowder

In Spring 2025, I taught a class on Esoteric Programming Languages. You can read the syllabus. The students were required to create their own languages. Some even volunteered to make their languages public by posting to the official esoteric programming language wiki.

What is an esoteric programming language? To quote the wiki

An esoteric programming language in British English or esolang in American English, is a computer programming language designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke, rather than for practical use.

The student languages that were posted to the esolang wiki are listed below. The rest were not made public.

At the time, I was to busy preparing lectures to make my own esolang. I had an idea for a language but not tme to create it.

At long last, I finally finished it.

This post introduces Clowder. Clowder is a cat themed esoteric programming language designed for creating quantum circuits.

The language specification is available on the esolang wiki Clowder. A more detailed description and supporting programming are being built on gitlab.

I think the best application of this language is as a teaching tool. A student who wants to learn about quantum programming would not be expected to implement something like OpenQASM as a homework. Clowder is small enough it could be a project, but also covers all the basic knowledge needed. It can be used to design any circuit. It would be used as an assignment to learn about a tool like IBM’s qiskit by translating the language. A student could also practice with the underlying math by building the entire simulator from the ground up.