Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Beatnik was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle as a derisive term to refer to the beats, i.e. members of the Beat Generation (this was a play off the name of the Russian satellite Sputnik). Beatnik is a simple esoteric programming language, based on a stack. A beatnik program consists of any sequence of English words. Each word is assigned the score you would get for it in a Scrabble® game. More information is available at http://www.cliff.biffle.org/esoterica/beatnik.html. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.