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Dev tools · April 8, 2012

FI

FizzBuzz in an esoteric programming language.

I've been contemplating applying for HackerSchool, so I was looking at the application and saw the piece about FizzBuzz. I'd somehow never heard of this before. It is a trivial task in a conventional language, so I thought I would have some fun on a long internet-less train ride back to Rochester. "Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings" http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html Doesn't it look kinda beautiful? http://benbrittain.com/imgs/fizzbuzzLarge.png here is a picture of the execution so you can see what is actually code.…

FizzBuzz in an esoteric programming language. launched on April 8, 2012 with 17 votes, #88 of 446 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 14 years on.

Visit dangermouse.net ↗Alternativestop 20% of April 2012

In plain words

Piet is an esoteric programming language where code is written as abstract paintings using 20 distinct colors, named after artist Piet Mondrian. Programs appear as geometric compositions rather than traditional text syntax. This project demonstrates Piet's capabilities by implementing the classic FizzBuzz coding challenge as a hand-drawn visual program, making it both functional and visually artistic for developers interested in unconventional programming approaches.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't all be esoteric language writers I suppose. Piet uses 20 distinct colours, as shown in the table at right. The 18 colours in the first 3 rows of the table are related cyclically in the following two ways: Note that "light" is considered to be one step "darker" than "dark", and vice versa. White and black do not fall into either cycle. Additional colours (such as orange, brown)…from dangermouse.net

In the maker’s words, at launch

I've been contemplating applying for HackerSchool, so I was looking at the application and saw the piece about FizzBuzz. I'd somehow never heard of this before. It is a trivial task in a conventional language, so I thought I would have some fun on a long internet-less train ride back to Rochester. "Piet is a…

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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

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