ook

Ook is an esoteric programming language created by David Morgan-Mar in 2003 as a parody of Brainfuck. It is designed to be readable by orangutans, using only the word Ook together with punctuation to convey commands. The language adopts Brainfuck’s minimalist approach, presenting a small set of operations that manipulate a memory tape and a data pointer.

Programs in Ook are formed from tokens consisting of two Ook words and punctuation marks, with eight distinct tokens corresponding to Brainfuck’s eight operations: moving the data pointer, modifying the byte at the pointer, input, output, and loop control. The exact syntax relies on combinations of Ook and punctuation to represent each operation, making the language functionally equivalent to Brainfuck while delivering a humorous, animal-themed facade. The memory model is typically a linear array of cells, each holding an integer value, and programs may use loops to perform repeated actions.

Because Ook maps to Brainfuck's command set, it is considered Turing complete in theory, meaning it can compute anything a Turing machine can, given sufficient time and memory. Implementations of Ook exist in various programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, and C, and are discussed within esoteric-programming communities. Ook is primarily a novelty language, valued for humor, demonstrations of minimal instruction sets, and as a puzzle or teaching tool rather than for practical software development.