Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 163 posts

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#151

Post by at_a_remove »

pragma_x wrote: post #130
davedx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like “what is idiomatic brainfuck” is a deeply philosophical question striking right to the heart of our craft…

Considering that BF is about as "turing-machine-like" as you can get, it does seem like an essential thing to determine. As if we were to delve any deeper we'd have to split atoms to measure our progress; it's downright primordial.

When I dip into little histories of how one thing or another came to pass (example: ten days to design Javascript) in our history of computing, I wonder if advanced civilizations do things like undertake mind-bending projects like, "Hey, let's redesign our computation from scratch, from Turing (or whatever They call it) machines on up to processors to implement these machines, and on up."

A language would be next, and with it the idioms.

HTML, starts off as a markup language for document display (and a fairly primitive one) but has morphed into an application-over-the-Internet, by adding CSS, Javascript, and so forth. What if the aliens designed a technology with this endpoint already in mind? After a few hundred years, they probably have a full list of controls (radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, sliders, and so on).

I just have this terrible feeling that everything we have is built on layers of cruft, "I need this by Monday" decisions, not-quite-optimal algorithms, and so on. And that we're probably wasting enormous amounts of computation and energy on this. Just think of how much invalid HTML is out there, and how much harder each browser must work to figure out the tag salad.

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#152

Post by giancarlostoro »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #5

Wow, would love to adopt this on our infra! Just one teensy problem - legal's a bit worried about the name. Would you consider renaming BF? Maybe Brainfriend?

Reminds me of how theres a Buttplug project that has what is considered the fastest bluetooth open source library. Problem is people cannot use it because importing “Buttplug IO” or whatever raises some eyebrows. Theres even been attempts at using it in DoD projects.

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#153

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #148
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how we haven't specified whether x is greater than or less than one.

I love that we complain about that before asking what we're measuring or whether higher or lower numbers are better. If you are asking such questions you aren't who I'm talking to and you need to leave the room immediately.

It's kind of a joke / riffing. Collaboration/elaboration, not attack. The "like" wasn't sarcasm; it was observing additional possibilities for meaning -- meanings that actually worked kind of amusingly to me.

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#154

Post by [deleted] »

bashauma wrote: post #83
mFixman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being the only true 2-dimensional language, Befunge only needs the square root of the lines of code to build an equivalent program to puny 1-dimensional programs like Brainfuck or C++. Stop trying to hire 10X engineers. Befunge applications are built by true X² engineers.

> Stop trying to hire 10X engineers. Befunge applications are built by true X² engineers. Best sales slogan of the year.

[deleted]

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#156

Post by rep_lodsb »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #120
brian-armstrong wrote: post #5

Wow, would love to adopt this on our infra! Just one teensy problem - legal's a bit worried about the name. Would you consider renaming BF? Maybe Brainfriend?

You could use my (rather silly) extension called "pbrain," which adds procedures to brainfuck. https://parkscomputing.com/page/pbrain In hindsight, I think it's aptly named. (EDIT: Gosh, I really need to update the .NET compiler to .NET 8.)

That's an interesting addition to the language, since the numeric "labels" are effectively pointers that can be changed anywhere in the program! Though from reading the interpreter code, it seems like it doesn't handle "nested" procedures that can (re)define other procedures or themselves, which could make this a lot more powerful.

Never done enough BF programming to come up with a good example, but I'm thinking about something like this:

    ( (
On the first call it increments it argument, then decrements on subsequent calls. There could also be a loop that switches a procedure between one of several definitions, which could be used to implement a state machine.

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#157

Post by rep_lodsb »

Frenchgeek wrote: post #119
jfktrey wrote: post #46

Love this. Years ago I hand-wired a CPU that natively executes Brainfuck code: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q8G2fWprwyo Might have to test some of these :)

Port a mips emulator for it so you can run Linux on it?

Or a 4004 emulator? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41600756

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#159

Post by nxobject »

Duanemclemore wrote: post #24

This is excellent for my needs! My company needs to migrate from INTERCAL and now I am convinced that Brainfuck is perfect for the job!

Buyer beware – as a a legacy mainframe user of INTERCAL (IBM VM/370), steer cleer of mainframe migration services that promise migration from INTERCAL to BF on commodity cloud on a fixed time scale – they use AI tools but don't do robust testing. Much better to stay on IBM but write new modules in enterprise z/INTERCAL, even if it's not the best developer environment.

Re: Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions

#160

Post by mbonnet »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #25
IncreasePosts wrote: post #21

Who in their right mind would choose brainfuck for enterprise solutions, over befunge?

You can't discount the need to keep your hiring pipeline full to replace the people whose RSUs have cliffed. Befunge, like Rust, is impossible to hire for, so nobody uses it, which means nobody has experience, which means it's impossible to hire for, so it's a bad idea to use it. BrainFuck has been around for decades and its problems can be avoided by just hiring sufficiently-talented developers.

On the contrary, I have found that Rust postings receive fewer but much higher quality candidates.
Post reply on HN