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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Then you can pitch it to VC's, as you'll be the only entrant in this burgeoning new space, with first mover advantage! The world will be your mussel!

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My pitch will target the enterprise DB, embedded, and military markets. I'll package it as something for highly-concurrent, real-time programming. Give them a language like ParaSail or Chapel that compiles to BrainFuck. Keep getting subcontracts to use it in criticsl, long-term projects. Eventually, the sham will come out but BrainFuck will be To Big To Fail (TM). Also leverage patent on key innovation forcing uptake of BrainFuck for at least 20 years.

I'm not sure it's worthy of a Bond villain but it's a start. ;)

Whatever, man. When all that falls on its face, CTOs will be googling for peeps with low level brainfuck debugging skills. But they can't hack BF themselves, so I'll ace the interview with no prep, and scoop a six fig salary. Remote, from Amsterdam. Part time, because, priorities.

Nah, they'll ask when they last had this problem. They'll learn that there were these migration tools developed to turn COBOL into C or Java with bug-for-bug compatibility. They'll pay some company like Semantic Designs to automate a conversion from BrainFuck to Rust since it will be popular on embedded systems by the time they're finished. The remoters will then spend all their time enhancing and debugging RustyBrainFuck while writing as much code in Rust as possible to hide the BrainFuck behind a neat interface. Building that was another enterprise project.

Unfortunately, you can't outrun software's hidden assumptions behind correct functioning forever. There will come a time, much like Y2K for COBOL, that their critical database will just loose everything if they don't make an internal change that requires understanding all the Rust, BrainFuck, Verilog, and analog components I used "because I was learning analog at the time."

I can't predict what they will do facing such a situation. I can tell you to start a brewery of fine Scotch that sends flyers to them around the time of the feasibility study. You'll make a killing. :)

It could be worse. No matter how bad the BF->Rust code that's generated is (it'd literally just be BF in a less compact syntax, most likely: it's pretty hard to convert idiom-wise), it's probably better than the Troff sources (as written by Joseph Ossanna).

Honestly, it'd probably be worth the effort to just write the Rust up front. The kind of technical debt you'd land in otherwise... euurgh.

"The kind of technical debt you'd land in otherwise... euurgh."

That's actually the point of my plan. :P

This leads naurally into my next question: do you hate everyone, just software engineers, or just idiots?

That's been a tough question to answer recently. The greedy and the idiots are always on the top of my list. There's significant overlap in those in market segment that might buy this CPU. They strangely also have a large supply of cash that's been flowing for a long time. I wouldn't have guessed that based on what they taught me back in high-school about economics.

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