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Artistic Programming Language

Ignoring the question about whether software is an artistic or an engineering endeavor, another interesting question is whether source code should be visually appealing?

Ramsey Nasser, a computer scientist and fellow at the Eyebeam Art+Technology Center in New York City, has developed a programming language based on Arabic script instead of English. The language is a Scheme-like functional programming language that has its roots in Lisp. It is called قلب – (pronounced Qalb) which is the Arabic word for heart.

Interestingly, the new language is also designed to support artistic code, i.e. visually pleasing code. To create such artistic code, you can change the length of lines that connect the Arabic letters. Thus the appearance of the source code can be altered without altering its function.

The code is available on GitHub.

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