esofiles/README.md

The Esoteric Files Archive

This is an archive of implementations of esoteric programming languages as well as language specs and programs written in them. You can find information on esoteric programming languages at the Esolang wiki.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Send me cool programs you've written in esolangs!

Legal stuff

Some programs in the archive have no associated copyright/license information. In general, I assume that authors of these programs don't care how the esolang community shares their programs, unless they've said otherwise, but it would still be better to keep this clear. If you are the author of such a program, unless it is a very short program (in which case there probably isn't an issue), please contact me and clarify the situation with regard to your program. I recommend you either make your programs public domain or use the MIT license.

Where there is license info, it's noted, and relevant license files are included in this repo in the _licenses subdirectory.

As a collective work, this archive itself is released under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication and license. This does not mean all the individual programs and documentation files are public domain, but that any additional copyright on the collection of them (or on this readme) is waived.

History

In 2005 I was part of a small group of weirdos online who were really into esoteric programming languages. Unfortunately, our community had a problem: websites devoted to esoteric programming languages tended to periodically go down. People would contribute something really cool and write an interpreter and a spec and a Turing-completeness proof and a quine in it. Then next thing we knew their site would be down, often missing from the Internet Archive too, and people who wanted to check out that language were out of luck.

I thus led the community in setting up two solutions to this problem: the public-domain wiki at Esolangs.org, and this Esoteric Files Archive (originally a Subversion repo). Wiki dumps were made available nightly and people were encouraged to mirror the wiki dumps and the files from Subversion so this content would never be lost.

Elliott Hird took over hosting of the wiki in 2012, and now in 2013 it seems appropriate that the file archive, to the extent it is still relevant, should become a git repo everyone can fork and clone to their heart's content.