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.
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. Three articles to date: a personal predecessor (Listening to Spanish Again), a series-aperture observation (What Technical Vocabulary Refuses to Carry), and a story-form lineage discovery (I Thought I Was the First. I Was the Fifth).
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.
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.