The earliest, and still the canonical example of an esoteric language was [[INTERCAL]],<ref>Matthew Fuller, [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-studies Software Studies], MIT Press, 2008</ref> designed in 1972 by [[Don Woods (programmer)|Don Woods]] and James M. Lyon, with the stated intention of being unlike any other programming language the authors were familiar with.<ref name="Raymond1996">{{cite book|author=Eric S. Raymond|title=The New Hacker's Dictionary|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&pg=PA258|year=1996|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=978-0-262-68092-9|page=258}}</ref><ref name="woods-lyon-intercal">{{citation|url=http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/intercal/intercal.txt |last1=Woods |first1=Donald R. |last2=Lyon |first2=James M. |year=1973 |title=The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual |accessdate=2009-04-24 |publisher=Muppetlabs.com |archiveurl=https://www.webcitation.org/5gGhTDeaV?url=http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/intercal/intercal.txt |archivedate=2009-04-24 |deadurl=yes |df= }}</ref> It [[parody|parodied]] elements of established programming languages of the day, such as [[Fortran]], [[COBOL]], and [[assembly language]].
For many years INTERCAL was represented only by paper copies of the INTERCAL manual. The language's revival in 1990 as an implementation in C under [[Unix]] stimulated a wave of interest in the intentional design of esoteric computer languages.
In 1993, [[Wouter van Oortmerssen]] created FALSE, a small [[stack-oriented programming language]], with syntax designed to make the code inherently obfuscated, confusing, and unreadable. It also has a compiler of only 1024 bytes.<ref name="Wouter">{{cite web | title= Interview with Wouter van Oortmerssen | journal = esoteric.codes | url = http://esoteric.codes/post/122942498363/interview-with-wouter-van-oortmerssen | date = 1 July 2015 | accessdate = 1 December 2015}}</ref> This inspired Urban Müller to create an even smaller language, the now-infamous [[brainfuck]], which consists of only eight recognized characters. Along with Chris Pressey's [[Befunge]] (like FALSE, but with a two-dimensional instruction pointer), brainfuck is now one of the best-supported esoteric programming languages. These are canonical examples of minimal [[Turing tarpit]]s and needlessly obfuscated language features. Brainfuck is related to the [[P′′]] family of [[Turing machine]]s.
