Should have at least [2020] in the title? (or earlier... the Feb 2020 is when the first submission of this page to HN happened)

Also, while there has been no big discussions of this page in particular, here is the best plain-language Urbit explanation I have seen:

"Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462

So, here's a few pointers of things I came across the past few years, and that you might like:

=== 1: Artifical Chemistries

You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry', I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere).

[1] http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang...

=== 2: 'Alchemist' esolang

Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179

=== 3: 'Hexagony' esolang

Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove.

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 [5] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [6] https://hexagony.net/

=== 4: Soviet/Russian programming languages

Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'.

[7] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behi...

=== 5: APL

It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9].

[8] https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 (and obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/)

=== 6: Urbit

Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11]

[10] https://urbit.org/ [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462