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by sargstuff 17 days ago
Obviously general purpose programming language(s) excluded[0]. -- per 'minimal'

Does usable / minimal mean no ecosystem / integrated development environment? No ecosystem/IDE would seem to exclude command line shell & unix 'one program does one thing well'chaining/sourcing. 'Excel as a Turing-complete Functional Programming Environment' would be excluded too![8]. Do at least need the ability to abstract/store & forward to get away from 'endless tape streams'. (traditional grep vs. grep with 'state awareness')

Would seem to some what depend on the domain of discourse.

1) Esoteric Programming Languages:

    "Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously"[1][2]. 

    Is a metaphor programming language an esoteric IDE?[3] (vs. apl/mumps)

 2) Domain Specific Languages[4]:

    Usable/minimal with a philosophical background : 'mov is turing complete'[5]
       symbolic macro application of electrical engineering concepts of NAND[6]

    APL works for some enginering backrounds.

    One can assemble a checklist of doom[7]; but BNF forms[9] for syntax highlighting[10] might be a better fit under the 'usable/minimal' category.

    Ummm... bnf forms aren't really usefull without higher order abstractions/usage with things such as ASTs and treesitter[11]

    Kinda circles back to a higher order form of of the no ecosystem/ide noted above. Nice, higher level abstraction under the NP != P category.

   Perhaps getting to the point and leaving a monad unevaluated is the simplest theoretical usable minimal programming language. Not very functional/usable though.
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[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_programming_la...

[1] "Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously" : https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48334594

[2] "The Hacker Folk Art of Esoeric Coding" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371188

[3] "Esolang, the esoteric progrmaming languages wiki": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16894676

    "homespring" vs. apl/mumps
[4] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language

      https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/concepts/domain-specific-languages/
[5] : https://leetarxiv.substack.com/p/mov-is-turing-complete-pape...

[6] : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/digital-logic/what-is-nand-gat...

[7] : https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes

[8] : "Excel as a Turing-complete Functional Programming Environment' : https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00115

[9] : typed-bnf : https://github.com/thautwarm/typed-bnf

[10] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_highlighting

[11] : Aborium: Tree-sitter code highlighting with Native and WASM targets : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27875333