Esoteric Programming

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by a Swiss physics student named Urban Müller, and notable for its extreme minimalism.

Brainfuck was created with the goal of creating an intentionally confusing Turing-complete language with the smallest possible compiler. The language consists of only eight simple commands and an instruction pointer.

While it is fully Turing-complete, it is not intended for practical use, but to challenge and amuse programmers. Brainfuck simply requires one to break commands into microscopic steps.

The language's name is a reference to the slang term brainfuck, which refers to things so complicated or unusual that they exceed the limits of one's understanding.

Brainfuck consists of just eight one character commands:

< > + - . , [ ]

All characters other than < > + - . , [ ] are considered comments by the Brainfuck compiler and ignored.

Despite the simplicity of the Brainfuck lexicon, it is one of the most confusing programming languages out there due to the massive amount of code that needs to be written to execute a simple program.

Examples:

For example, when a programmer wants to learn a new language, one of the first programs they usually teach themselves to write in that language is called “Hello, World!” where the entire point of the program is to display “Hello, World!” on the computer screen. In the case of a common programming language like Python, the code for this program looks like this:

print “Hello, World!”

Yet that same program written in Brainfuck would look like this:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]

++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

The “Hello, World!” program with comments: