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My "not so gracious" interpretation: "It would invalidate the claim that we wish to make, so... no true scotsman"


Author here. We anticipated this as a possible criticism of our "we built the world's tiniest programming language" claim. That's why we wrote the Brainfuck interpreter too. As far as I know, the 99 byte Brainfuck interpreter that's included in this blog post is the tiniest one to date. So even if that invalidates our tiny LISP victory, it'd still be a victory for the team since we built the competition too.


Lisp is a language that people actually use to get work done; Brainfuck isn't.


Well… I believe it was James Gosling who said that there are two types of computer languages: “ones people complain about and ones nobody uses”. So if you’re complaining about Brainfuck then it must be a language people use by process of elimination ; )


Stroustrup, not Gosling. And I like your logic. :)


This presumes that "ones people complain about" and "ones nobody uses" are mutually exclusive - and I'm reasonably sure that Brainfuck is clear evidence against such mutual exclusivity ;)


Unless your "work" is proving that a language is Turing complete. That is, to my knowledge, the only serious use of brainfuck.


I suppose the humor was lost in my message.




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