So, here's a few pointers of things I came across the past few years, and that you might like:
=== 1: Artifical Chemistries
You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry',
I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere).
Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago.
Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove.
Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'.
It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9].
Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11]
=== 1: Artifical Chemistries
You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry', I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere).
[1] http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang...
=== 2: 'Alchemist' esolang
Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago.
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179
=== 3: 'Hexagony' esolang
Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 [5] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [6] https://hexagony.net/
=== 4: Soviet/Russian programming languages
Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'.
[7] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behi...
=== 5: APL
It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9].
[8] https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 (and obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/)
=== 6: Urbit
Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11]
[10] https://urbit.org/ [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462