Babel · RCI
A methodology for building esoteric programming languages.
The esoteric-programming-language field has produced a vast corpus and a vague methodology. The wiki at esolangs.org catalogues something on the order of 1,500 named languages, with roughly 800 Brainfuck derivatives in the largest single category, every one of them hand-rolled, every author repeating the same restructuring work. Babel is the methodology the field has lacked for thirty years: a parameter schema for esoteric-language construction, plus the runtime that turns a parameter sheet into three lockstep outputs, a runnable interpreter, a transpiler to a chosen base, and a specification page.
Babel travels with a companion language, Inflexión: a hand-built esoteric programming language whose semantics flow from the grammatical features of Rioplatense Argentine Spanish. Inflexión is the fifth member of a small lineage of inflection-driven non-English natural-language esolangs (Perligata, Espro, Tampio, Wenyan, Inflexión) and is the first to use a living Romance language. The two artefacts inform each other; they do not depend on each other. Either can be read on its own.
This is the project’s public landing page. The work is in planning phase as of May 2026; the runtime is in active development; the formal papers are at Draft 1+. The series will publish in installments, not as a single big release.
Playground, Try Babel in your browser ↗
A web playground for the Babel runtime. Pick a parameter sheet (vanilla Brainfuck, Rioplatense Brainfuck), type a program, watch it run. Inflexión proper coming when the parser ships. Live at babel.roderickc.com.
Babel, Methodology Paper
The first-installment white paper. Why the field has produced ~1,500 esoteric languages and ~800 Brainfuck derivatives without a methodology, what a parameter schema for esolang construction looks like, and how the runtime turns a parameter sheet into three lockstep outputs (interpreter, transpiler, specification page).
Inflexión, Companion Language
A hand-built esoteric programming language whose semantics flow from the grammatical features of Rioplatense Argentine Spanish. The fifth member of a small lineage (Perligata, Espro, Tampio, Wenyan, Inflexión) and the first to use a living Romance language. Lives at /inflexion.
Articles, The Long-Form Series
A LinkedIn-syndicated essay series on the impact of language in technology. Nine articles, now complete: three narrative openers (Listening to Spanish Again; What Technical Vocabulary Refuses to Carry; I Thought I Was the First. I Was the Fifth.) and the six-part technical curriculum walking each of Inflexión's grammatical-semantic mappings, ser/estar, mood, aspect, clitics, diminutive/augmentative, and number agreement.
Hello World in Inflexión, and What It Took
Bridge from the article series into the Babel phase. A process / craft piece: writing a Brainfuck interpreter in Inflexión surfaced runtime gaps the design paper had hand-waved, and Spanish grammar closed each one. Ends where the next phase begins, the moment Babel generates the Brainfuck that Inflexión interprets, and the loop closes.
Research Notes, Working Drafts
Self-contained notes drafted as the LLM-oriented programming-language design work develops. Each note stands on its own and is marked with its dates and current status. Later, when the underlying questions have settled, individual notes will be compiled into longer papers.
Anticipated Objections
Living document. Constituency-specific friction we anticipate from the esolang community, programming-language researchers, computational linguists, generative-AI practitioners, Spanish-speaking developers, and CS educators, with current best replies. Honest preparation rather than defensive performance.
What a debugger across eight esolanguages taught us
Eighth-installment essay (2026-05-18). What we learned building Witness Mode, the playground's step debugger, across eight language families: snapshot timing as a language-design choice in disguise, the program-counter cleavage, source-text re-tokenisation as a structural anti-pattern, and the implementation iceberg that any external tool inevitably surfaces. Closes on a reframe: every language is a contract between a programmer and an observer, and the observer's side is what most specs leave unwritten.
Authored by Ramon Rodriguez under the auspices of RCI. Additional authors and collaborators welcome. Source code (when the runtime ships) at github.com/Roderick-Consulting-Inc.