Brainfuck
esoteric, minimalist programming language
Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Swiss student Urban Müller. Designed to be extremely minimalistic, the language consists of only eight simple commands, a data pointer, and an instruction pointer.
Brainfuck is an example of a so-called Turing tarpit: it can be used to write any program, but it is not practical to do so because it provides so little abstraction that the programs get very long or complicated. While Brainfuck is fully Turing-complete, it is not intended for practical use but to challenge and amuse programmers. Brainfuck requires one to break down programs into small and simple instructions.
The language takes its name from the slang term brainfuck, which refers to things so complicated or unusual that they exceed the limits of one's understanding, as it was not meant or made for designing actual software but to challenge the boundaries of computer programming.
Because the language's name contains profanity, many substitute names are used, such as brainf*ck, brainfsck, branflakes, brainoof, brainfrick, BrainF, and BF.
History
Müller designed Brainfuck with the goal of implementing the smallest possible compiler, inspired by the 1024-byte compiler for the FALSE programming language. Müller's original compiler was implemented in Motorola 68000 assembly on the Amiga and compiled to a binary with a size of 296 bytes. He uploaded the first Brainfuck compiler to Aminet in 1993. The program came with a "Readme" file, which briefly described the language, and challenged the reader "Who can program anything useful with it?
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