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Comment by mrtranscendence | Hacker News Reader

I've only seen "esoteric" refer to programming languages that are deliberately constructed to be obscure or unusual, usually in ways that make them unusable in some practical sense. Your Brainfucks or Malbolges, say. I've never heard of anyone applying that term to Lisp or especially F#. They might be unpopular, but they're usable, practical languages with good implementations.

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A lot of people consider anything not in the tiobe top 10 to be esoteric (especially for the purposes of enterprise work).

Maybe obscure is a better word here?

Obscure is a good choice. I’d probably use niche. Honestly, esoteric could be a good word to describe lisp, except for the fact that it seems to already exist as a term for a category that wouldn’t include lisp.

Niche is fair. Basically, I'm trying to describe "not mainstream".

By this metric, Ruby, Swift, Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Typescript are all obscure. Some of these are even more obscure than Lisp.

Correct. I know plenty of enterprises that do not touch any of those, mostly because of their fear of not being able to find devs familiar with those languages.

As discussed elsewhere, it's possible niche might be a better term to describe what I'm talking about here than obscure.

I'm solving Advent of Code in Whitespace, a quintessential esolang.

https://github.com/andrewarchi/ws-challenges

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