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"Writing new programs that do the same thing would also make it quite annoying for them..."

Hmm.... first person to write an implementation in Brainfuck gets a cookie. :)

Feeling masochstic? Try the Brainfuck language. It's every bit as good as it sounds.

I don't have time to look at the article at the moment, but the headline reminds me of BrainFuck. It's a cute little language that emulates the functions of a Turing machine.

Maybe someone can brush me up on my theory: is a Universal Machine a Turing Machine?

I have used lot's of programming languages and Delphi just is the easiest to use.
It's a nightmare when occasionally doing some ciding in C(++).
Oh, 1 hint, don't use API's. Kylix kicks a$$ to !

Or brainf*ck :)

How about BF?

And ANY language can have all of those attributes.

Of course any program in any language can have those attributes. But are you seriously arguing that all programming languages are equally maintainable or equally usable by teams? Are False or Intercal really just as easy to maintain as Perl or Python? Is csh just as easy to write a 500,000 line program in as C++?

Obviously anyone saying that you can't write a maintainable or large program in perl is overstating the case. What more reasonable people are saying is that perl makes it easy to hang yourself, probably too easy. We can all sit around and say only other programmers make mistakes and thus we don't need a bondage and discipline language but when you look at the state of the average code base that argument is hard to take seriously.

People are writing 4k intros for linux, there are even some tools for doing just that. Also check this out, a Linux program just 45 bytes long, shorter then the ELF executable header :P.

Brainfuck

Here is a program:

If you want to experience the Turing tarpit (where anything is possible, but nothing is easy enough to actually do) firsthand, try the Brainfuck language, based closely on the turing machine. the language has 8 instructions, and only one of them (input) has any arguments beyond an implicit current location. The compiler is 240 bytes!

As if in precognition, a language has already been developed for ternary computers:
TriINTERCAL! (the link is about INTERCAL, chapter 6 is about the TriINTERCAL extension)

I can't wait until college courses are taught in this truly wonderous and -- who would have thought -- futuristic language.

A clueless moderator marked it down as flamebait. A language has to be pretty awful for that to happen.

Anyway, here's Brainfuck Also here

It's Turing complete, 8 instructions, and programs look something like this

You think Perl is bad? Try the Brainfuck langauage. Here is some code for factoring large numbers written in brainfuck.

I to was once at a loss when it came to handling email. I didn't know what to do with the tool.

Since then I have discovered that email is a wonderful tool for getting in trouble while drunk. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of ways to get in trouble operating a computer while drunk. I currently have a Compaq Proliant 6500 sitting in my bedroom due to a drunken visit to ebay. But email is much more effective. In my time, I've managed to let a heavily armed coworker know that I wished to knot and couple like frogs in a cistern. This, of course got me fired. I also managed to challenge ESR to a duel and notify our beloved Malda that his girlfriend is a beast.

After enough of these episodes, I've come to realize that this is the real purpose of email. To let you say those things you only say while drunk to anyone at any time.

Truly a marvelous invention Mr. Katz, I wonder that you did not touch on this aspect.

Your friend,
--Shoeboy

i kindof liked Brainf**k ... this is the other extreme !!!

If we want a decent language for the new millennium, we should go for APL. Fast, concise, and an ideal teaching language (note that the link is to APlus, a blend of APL and C which is apparently used by the Morgan Stanley investment bank). True, modern computers don't come with keyboards with enough keys to program it, but we can overcome that with overlays.

Alternatively, I'd love to see someone try web scripting in Brainfuck (advantages: simple, clear, easy to write an interpreter), or Befunge (break out of the depressing paradigms of modern languages! Truely adds a new dimension to program code).

I am positive Brainf*ck will be on the podium.

That may be true, but he wrote everything in BrainFuck

Well, if you are constantly hassled by more codebase to use (more to learn, more bloat to be added), better development tools (that take more time to learn than the time you might save), more documentation (for new products that does exactly the same as the old products, except everything is different), how are you supposed to get the time to work? When are you going to sit down and simply hack?
Yes you're right. Keep it simple and complete. Thats why I code in brainfuck. That way I can get started faster than the Java developer using JBuilder. I'm bound to be more productive right?

Besides, I doubt more shit means better jobs. A good job is somewhere where you can simply do your thing, and get paid for it, not somewhere where you will have to incorporate every buzzword in a project description to be able to get something done (even if you get paid more). Let's face it, new doesn't mean better. For what it does, Fortran is a great language. It lets you get things done.
Agreed. I'm just saying more perl users --> more perl jobs --> more perl users.

And if you really believe open source will magically give you faster development, then you really need a reality check. While it might be true of some specific projects, it is certainly not a universal truth. Put 3-5 fulltime developers on a project, or 100 student hobbyists and watch who can keep up with deadlines. Open source certainly has some benefits (especially for the customer), but it is certainly not a silber bullet.
I'm not saying open source gives faster development, period. I'm saying open source Java development moves faster than open source Ruby development mainly because there are are more Java coders. If a language is growing it makes sense to jump on "the bandwagon" to reap the rewards. And if that isn't clear enough, I'll state it more clearly.

Ruby is a well designed, very easy to learn, language. It's userbase is growing. "Jumping on the bandwagon" will have many advantages.

12k, eh? You need to check out http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/ teensy.html, which describes just how to make a small Linux ELF program. Fed up with program bloat, the author found just how small he could make a program: 45 bytes.

If code were not speech, how can one explain the existance of languages which clearly have no purpose beyond fun and art? How can any program written in INTERCAL or Brainf*ck be viewed, if not as a work of art (or, at the very least, as a work of comedy)?

If code were not speech, how can one explain the existance of languages which clearly have no purpose beyond fun and art? How can any program written in INTERCAL or Brainf*ck be viewed, if not as a work of art (or, at the very least, as a work of comedy)?

While the Pig Latin filter is a good start, a more advanced filter such as the & gt;Swedish Chef, et. al.</a> filters would be much tougher to "crack". And lets not forget rot13.

Seriously, though, if the user is given a method to find songs (i.e., "encript" the song name), couldn't the RIAA use the same technic to find the songs? The only viable alternative would be for everyone to have there own encoding (obfuscation) scheme and share this with their friends, requiring the RIAA to "decode" the names. Telling how the encoding works would defeat the protection offered by the DMCA.

can be found right here.

It's cool because it's really small.

In fact I think it's the smallest program possible with an ELF binary. About an eight of the size of the excecutable created if you use some kind of fancy-schamcy assembler. And a 50th the size of the same program created by gcc.

darn cool if you ask me.

Honestly, I don't know what the world is coming to these days. OOP is easy in brainf*ck.

Man, why'd you have to go and spoil a good point by recommending BASIC? There are few languages with such a great capacity to teach bad habits, except perhaps for this one.
--
Patrick Doyle

Of course the Modula-2 program would contain at least twice as many lines of code. Hell, a decent printf() statement in C ends up as 5 lines of Modula-2!

I have been able to kick ass upon the majority of CS guys that I've met.

Let's try this question: Would you be able to kick the ass of your present self if you went thru a full CS curriculum?

This means that since you can do a turing machine, you can do my favorite language Brainfuck with Life. I am still waiting for M$ to bring out Visual Brainfuck (VB for you folks), to make the interface stuff easier... This might be a breakthrough.

I was wrong about Goedel, but let's talk Turing.

Remember, you can use a TM to make statements or prove/disprove theorems about TMs.

Provided you have a longer tape. According to this page, a Turing machine has among its parts "a head that can read, write, and move along an infinitely long tape that is divided into cells" (strong mine). In the real world there is no such thing as infinite RAM. An emulator in general has to have more registers than the system it's emulating; otherwise, registers will spill to RAM, which is a Bad Thing for an emulator that runs at such a low level, unlike user-space game console emulators that can spare a few bytes.

Oh, BTW, the Brainfuck language is one of the smallest (eight instructions) Turing-complete languages in existence.

I'm gonna submit mine in brainfuck. Just to get the contest blacklisted by censorware idiots.

People seem to think that we need some radical new paradigm in the way we're doing things in order to indicate progress; Microsoft is all too eager to jump in with a spiffy new standard and a handful of TLAs to placate this crowd and keep us all on the frequent-upgrade track. This is not good innovation (and while I'm talking about Microsoft, this isn't either). Sometimes different and more complex doesn't beat tried-and-true. Can't innovation be combining yesterday's solutions with today's needs to make a new product? Why are people so willing to attach the label of innovation on things that are new but not better?

I work in a Microsoft NT / IBM AS/400 / Linux environment. The AS/400 feels archaic, but does what we need it to. Linux feels archaic, but does what we need it to. Microsoft NT looks good.

---

As a matter of fact, I don't think brainfuck is all that cryptic. But perhaps you could discern my bias from my sig. :)

I'd go so far as to say that brainfuck, having been forced to be both logical and simple by virtue of its drive for compactness, is an excellent teaching language. It's a good introduction to the concept of arrays, to ASCII, and to while-loops and sentinel values. I would not go so far as to say that brainfuck is a good first language, but it might be an excellent companion language to C (which was also my first language, and which I do still recommend as a first language: it gives you a good foundation, and is absolutely imperative if you want to be a UNIX developer). Especially since its interpreter and certain tools are written in C.

Anyone interested in learning more about brainfuck can visit the presentation page I set up a couple of semesters ago, when I had to deliver (you guessed it) a class presentation on the language. It was meant as a companion to my talk and demo programs, so if you don't find it as informative as you'd like, follow the links at the bottom. Or, better yet . . . .

Anyway, if you think brainfuck is bad, you've obviously never tried Befunge. ;P

i am shocked by the incredible ignorance displayed in this article, by the way it covers such a tiny division of the programming languages in wide use, and such bad languages at that. This person seems to think that everyone in the world uses obscure, cumbersome languages like C, C++, objective C, java, perl, lisp, PHP, Bash, FORTRAN, Cobol, Forth, smalltalk or some form of assembly. What an isolated world this person must live in! He seems to have some extreme bias toward use of functional programming languages.

Specically i am very annoyed by the total lack of any discussion of INTERCAL, umlambda, or orthogonal--what i feel to be the most important languages out there, especially for games. None of these were even mentioned! Why would you write an first person shooter in C++ instead of INTERCAL? Why, as far as i'm aware there isn't even opengl available for c-based languages!

If you don't like these three above for some silly reason, at LEAST use Forth. any language where you can't redefine the value of four is for wimps. Or use Visual Basic-- its usefulness, portability, flexibility and sheer power are unparalleled. (i'm sorry, that last bit was a little over the top, wasn't it?)

-mcc
hmm. that reminds me, i need to learn objective c..
2B OR NOT 2B == FF

Intercal disturbs me deeply.