Language is almost as old as thought itself. Prose allows the writer to communicate with a precision and flourish that poetry sometimes sacrifices for form, yet the best prose still carries a rhythm — a life of its own that transcends mere information.
Computer programs are, at their core, precise instructions for a machine. They are functional, exact, and largely indifferent to aesthetics. Yet a well-crafted program can possess an elegance that its author recognises as something approaching beauty — a kind of invisible poetry hiding in the logic.
What if prose and program were one and the same? What if the same sentence a reader appreciates for its cadence also directed a machine to compute, to loop, to decide? That is the question Bespoke answers. Like a suit cut to a precise measure, every word in a Bespoke program is chosen not only to read naturally but to run correctly.
What do Bespoke programs look like?
This is a program that prints "Hello, World!"
more peppermint tea? ah yes, it's not bad I appreciate peppermint tea it's a refreshing beverage but you immediately must try the gingerbread I had it sometime, forever ago oh, and it was so good! made the way a gingerbread must clearly be baked in fact, I've got a suggestion I may go outside to Marshal Mellow's Bakery so we both receive one
This short prose reads as a pleasant conversation — and simultaneously outputs Hello, World! to the screen.
How is that possible?
Bespoke encodes instructions in the lengths of words, not their content. Each word's letter count becomes a digit. Those digits, in sequence, form the program's instruction stream. The actual words can be anything — a letter to a friend, a recipe, a confession — as long as the lengths are right.
How do I write and run these programs?
A Python interpreter is available on the Download page. Run it from the terminal like this:
program.bspk is the file you want to run. (Any extension works, though .bspk is recommended.)
- -i / --input — Take input from a specified file, instead of STDIN.
Visit the Tutorial for a complete guide to the instruction set, or head to Try It Online to run your first Bespoke program right in the browser.
Who started this initially?
Bespoke was designed by Josiah Winslow, building on his earlier language Poetic. The goal was to keep the same natural-language encoding while replacing the underlying Brainfuck model with something far more expressive: a stack machine with arbitrary-precision integers, a heap, loops, conditionals, and functions.