Human language has come a long way from petroglyphs and hieroglyphics just to devolve back into emojis replacing full coherent sentences. Emojis have become so prevalent now that an entire computer programming language known as emojicode that has even been created in their honor.
At first glance this may seem like a weird thing to do. After all, why further complicate something that is already complicated to begin with? But at the same time emojis are really nothing more than symbols. Just the same way that things like { # @ ! ” = + are. Just learn what the symbols are, or in this case what the emojis stand for, and over time you can probably learn to code in emoji fairly easily.
The New Stack explains:
“In Emojicode, the grape emoji signals the beginning of a block of code, while the end of the block gets indicated with the watermelon emoji. But why grapes? Mostly personal preference, Weidmann acknowledged, although he adds that early on, ‘I decided to use emojis that are very rarely used to express something meaningful’ for the everyday symbols like the curly braces found in other languages.
‘Curly braces convey as little meaning as those grapes and watermelon. Except for the fact, of course, that we as humans perceive those curly braces as belonging together. But it’s actually just a matter of time, and you’ll perceive the watermelon and the grape as belonging together too.’
It’s a racecar-starting checkered flag emoji that indicates which code runs during execution, and instead of quotation marks around text, emojicode uses a smiley face at the beginning and an exclamation point at the end. To indicate a string, the code is enclosed between two ‘ABC’ emojis.”
Sounds easy enough. And fun! I actually tried to learn how to program once but got stuck at a certain point about five chapters into the training and was so frustrated that I never went back. But now thanks to emojicode I may have a reason to reconsider.
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