Jasper & Farhad talk about some esoteric visual functional languages

Haskell ist not what it used to be. Gone are the days when one needed at least one PhD and many years of going through monad tutorials to write the “Hello World” program. In a time when it is possible for first year undergrads to master functional programming, and do it in any language of their choice, it is time for us as a community to return to our shared values: Obscurity, incomprehensibility and esotericism in programming. Although recent advances in vibe coding by Big Tech share the same aims, they cannot do this alone.

In this talk, Jasper and Farhad will present some functional visual esoteric languages (functional visual esolangs (functional vesolangs (fun vesolangs))) they have been working on.

Jasper will talk about Turnstyle, a fun vesolang that he cooked up during ZuriHac 2024. Tragically, Turnstyle failed to be adopted in the industry, since it didn't really scale to larger programs.

Inspired by Turnstile, and in an attempt to fix this problem, Farhad ended up working with students on the fun vesolang Mondriλn, which uses scalable vector graphics (SVGs) rather than bitmaps, effectively solving the scalability problem.

This talk follows the ZuriHac 2026 organisation kickoff meeting that starts at 18h15 in the same room, which everyone is welcome to attend.