Guides to three different programming languages and various other programming concepts in John Egbert's possession.
Programming languages with various punny names are encountered on many of the Homestuck cast's computers.
~ATH[]
- Main article: ~ATH
~ATH - "tilde ATH", as in till death - is a programming language dealing with the lifespans of things; programs written in ~ATH loop endlessly until the death or destruction of the object called at the beginning of the loop.
John Egbert and Karkat Vantas both try unsuccessfully to master ~ATH. Sollux Captor, though, is said to be “obnoxiously good at it”, and Roxy Lalonde, an expert hacker, is at least able to succeed in blowing things up with it.
^CAKE[]
John has written a few ^CAKE - "caret CAKE", as in carrot cake - files and left them on his desktop, though their nature is not known. The names of the files, like the name of his ~ATH file, suggest that he has not found much success with this language either, or at least does not take it particularly seriously.
DIS*[]
DIS* - "DIS asterisk", as in disaster risk - is among the languages John seems to have attempted to learn based on his collection of books, but nothing else about it is known.