A couple of thematically related videos:
From Strange Loop, last year, “Recreating forgotten programming languages, for art!” by Sher Minn Chong:
video description:
The early beginnings of computer graphics in the 1960s saw the birth of a number programming languages that were created specifically for making animations and graphics. … back then, many of these languages cutting-edge and made possible the completely new field of making art with computers. A prolific example of this was Bell Labs’ BEFLIX, a language created to make animations using a microfilm plotter.
Surviving documentation of these languages are scarce, much less the actual compilers or interpreters themselves. They were simple languages, yet they were used to create some of the most complex and compelling graphics even by today’s standard. In order to understand how they were made, as well as the limitations of computer graphics that artists and programmers were working with, I attempted to recreate an interpreter for ART 1. … Expect to see lots of vintage computer art!
And from NDC, earlier this year, “The Art of Code” by Dylan Beattie:
From the video description:
look at the origins of programming as an art form, from Conway’s Game of Life to the 1970s demoscene and the earliest Obfuscated C competitions. We’ll talk about esoteric languages and quines - how DO you create a program that prints its own source code? We’ll look at quine relays, code golf and generative art, and we’ll explore the phenomenon of live coding as performance