Hell it's in the Wikipedia
The brainfuck programming language is an esoteric programming language noted for its extreme minimalism. It is a Turing tarpit, designed to challenge and amuse programmers, and was not made to be suitable for practical use.[1] It was created in 1993 by Urban Müller.The entire syntax is composed of eight commands >< +-.[], brainfuck ignores anything else. Eli was splendidly unaware of this until sucked in by the kind of marvelous indirection that blogs can deliver, first a reference in passing to "a comma based operating system" at Popehat which produced a pointer to the wikipedia in the comments.
There are dialects
"Eli is not forgetting the filth commandment"
ReplyDeleteDon't worry - Wiki says it is a "proper noun".
With dialects like these, who needs dialectics ?
ReplyDeleteWrite-only languages have a long history, but APL was at least useful.
ReplyDeleteYears ago (we're talking ca. 1983 here) I was the circuit board designer at a Dutch company. Their programmers all used APL. Indeed, it gives 'brainfuck' whole new connotations. Talk about write-only! IIRC, you could transform a 3-D matrix into a single value using just one operator. I learned to grapple with it, but was never really comfortable with it.
DeleteIn the same sense as ancient Klingon.
ReplyDeleteThe promise of APL led to me getting an early computer with a 387 chip. The high cost of stat software seemed to make developing a library of APL stat routines a Good Idea. [daub eyes from laughter turning to tears]
ReplyDeleteThen the reality of writing esoteric software in an opaque language set in. APL was not only oriented differently, it demanded a kind of Winky Dink and Me plastic overlay on the keyboard to accommodate its private icons for operators.
Oook. Eeek!
ReplyDeleteAre you trying to tell us that Eeek! is the dative of Oook, or the imperative ?
ReplyDeleteEli: APL did get real use. Wall Street guys had their own internal APL software for large risk analyses, at least into the 1990s. Morgan Stanley still uses the A+ variant, I think.
ReplyDeleteLife is easier with bitmap displays than when one needed a special Selectric typeball.
Is there a Klingonese equivalent of the old APL behavior where a colleague would enter your office, scribble a one-liner on your blackboard, and challenge "What do you think that does?"?
Russell, I suspect that the Librarian was observing that the output of Hex is a brainfuck - an observation with which most at UU would agree.
ReplyDeleteBernard J.