Show HN: Asciidots – a 2d esoteric language based on ASCII art

3 aaronjanse 1 8/18/2025, 1:12:41 PM ajanse.me ↗

Comments (1)

aaronjanse · 3h ago
I wrote a 2d esolang called asciidots inspired by ascii art and circuits, where “dots” follow ascii art paths and undergo operations. I posted it to Show HN a while back (2017!), where it ended up getting attention on HN and elsewhere.

Since then, I used Pyodide to make a home page with an interactive demo of the language. This let me use the existing Python reference implementation of asciidots in the browser, allowing exact feature parity (bugs and all) to support existing code. As a fun trick, I used a CSS animation for the logo instead of a GIF so it wouldn’t freeze while Pyodide is loading.