Whilst the term "code golf" was apparently first used in 1999 with Perl,[3] and later popularised through the use of Perl to write a program that performed RSA encryption,[4] a similar informal competition is known to have been popular with earlier APL hackers.
The challenging nature of aggressively optimizing for program size has itself long been recognized; for example, a 1962 coding manual for Regnecentralen's GIER computer notes that "it is a time-consuming sport to code with the least possible number of instructions" and recommends against it for practical programming.
Examples include GolfScript, Flogscript, Stuck, and Vyxal, which are Turing-complete languages that provide constructs for concisely expressing ideas in code.
Because golfing languages compete for extreme brevity, their design sacrifices readability, which is important for practical production environments, and therefore they are often esoteric.
Sometimes, however, a language is designed for a practical purpose but turns out to be suitable for code golf.