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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure, but that's pretty much all it can be.

To expand on that: if he'd written his own toy language, say, odds are it would never go anywhere, but, who knows... maybe it will find a niche. Using "brainfuck" pretty much guarantees that the code will never find a practical use.

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That's not the point. These are the kind of projects programmers do for fun. Your comments is like saying "if this guy didn't go the zoo, but rather spent his day at work, he at least might have been productive". Now, I can imagine you wouldn't enjoy watching somebody else's pictures of zoo animals, unless you were very interested in zoo animals, like, say, some people are interested in compiler technology and/or esoteric languages. Because Brainfuck is an insanely simple language to compile/interpret it's actually makes for a nice small example!

I did a small language for fun: http://www.hecl.org

And it has actually turned out to be useful, besides being a lot of fun to work on.

I am not saying fun projects need to be useful (I'd be the last one to say that), I'm saying "why ensure they'll never be useful?".

Here's another language that is a 'fun project' that, who knows, might be quite useful some day:

http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language

Edit and the classic "hobby project":

> "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Once again, by not tying a rock to his leg, it eventually went on to be just a bit more important than a hobby project.

> I am not saying fun projects need to be useful (I'd be the last one to say that), I'm saying "why ensure they'll never be useful?".

Because some things are done for learning exercises and nothing more.

Just because that code isn't going to do anything useful when executed, it does not mean that there is no value in the exercise of producing or sharing the code.

Not that it needs that much justification, fun is a good enough reason.

Ok, you people are seriously failing to comprehend that which I am attempting to communicate to you.

* I have no problems with 'fun projects'. I do them myself.

* I have no problem with 'useless code'. Many fun projects are never useful. I have done these myself.

* I have no problem with learning for learning's sake. I have engaged in lots of that.

What I don't agree with is artificially limiting your project's potential. By choosing to implement brainfuck, instead of Tcl or Lua or Forth or Lisp or any number of other languages (even if it's just a toy version, and not the full spec), you've consigned your project to the dustbin before you've even finished it. To my way of thinking, that just doesn't make any sense. If you want to be artistic, go out and make your own language.

Not sure why you see implementing a simple language to learn the underlying techniques as "artificially limiting" the project's potential. Maybe this is just a step to implementing a more complicated language.

> Not sure why you see implementing a simple language to learn the underlying techniques as "artificially limiting" the project's potential.

Even a simple language like Hecl is used for real things in the real world, something I wouldn't have imagined when I started writing it. An implementation of Brainfuck will never be used for anything more than learning.

Which continues to be my point: learning's great, but why not learn and do something that has a tiny chance of developing into something big?

You're assuming that every thing that people work on actually needs the potential to become "big".

What about the people that study klingon? Or Esperanto? Or Elvish?

You assume that a person cannot gain something by simply learning something that has no practical purpose. This isn't the case. By working on BF, someone might make some neuron connections that help them with logical thought with other projects, by breaking down logical thinking into very simplistic, basic symbols--completely removing "language" out of the equation.

You just don't know. :P

Then how about giving an example of somebody who had some benefit of learning Klingon, not related to Klingon as is?

Specifically, some of the gutteral sounds used in Klingon are sounds that are used in real languages. If you're a native American-English speaker, these sounds do not exist in our language. If someone here is so dedicated to learning Klingon and Star Trek, it might open their ability to A) learn real languages easier, B) to pronounce many of the sounds used in those languages.

The Klingon Dictionary is very good at explaining grammatical concepts. It made me interested in how language worked. After reading it I was able to understand a French grammar book and go from getting an E in my French GCSE mock exam to a B in the final a couple of months later. I went on to get a degree in French (which I never used but that's beside the point).

> You assume that a person cannot gain something by simply learning something that has no practical purpose

Actually, what I wrote, if you'd bother to read it, is: "Yeah, he learned something for sure, but that's pretty much all it can be." so don't put words into my mouth.

The point boils down to this:

* It'll probably never become big.

* That doesn't really matter, it's mostly for learning and for fun.

* But even so, why preclude that? <- this is all that is causing people to get their knickers in a knot over what I wrote.

> You're assuming that every thing that people work on actually needs the potential to become "big".

If you get that essentially for free, then why the hell not?

The effort you've expended to debate this will soon meet & then exceed the effort that went into the tracing JIT in question. When you reach that point, you'll have some soul searching to do.

You'd be annoyed too if people continued to misconstrue what you were saying in order to attack a strawman.

cough

"Elvish" doesn't actually exist. There's Quenya, or 'high' elvish and Sindarin, 'low' or 'gray' elvish.

cough

Carry on!

Writing fast Brainfuck interpreter is one of the best optimization exercises I've ever encountered. Trivial to start, easy to improve and then it gets progressively harder with every iteration.

I see your point (and kind of agree)... but isn't the fact that it's Brainf*ck part of the fun?

I can't disagree more.

This is a great project for learning how to use LLVM because there is nothing to add complexity. There is no need for a runtime library. There is no need for a complicated parser. With those parts gone, all that matters is building the compiler, JIT core, tracing algorithm, and so on.

Now that the author knows how to do all that, he's mentally prepared to be productive when taking on a more complex task, like writing his own language or improving an existing one.

You seem to think that because it's on Github you're supposed to use it. Incorrect. Github is just a public backup and a way of sharing something with your friends. Kind of like posting your drunken photos on Facebook. Productive? No. Fun? Yes.

> You seem to think that because it's on Github you're supposed to use it.

Actually, if you read my post, you would have understood that that is not the case:-/

Your point about it being a "minimum viable language" is a good one though, but I find it difficult to think there isn't something else he could have chosen.

find it difficult to think there isn't something else he could have chosen

Why do you care? How does this affect you in any way?

It's obviously not my place to say what other people do with their time. It just seems like wasted effort to me; that's all.

I guess arguing against the groupthink (replete with reddit style mob downvoting) is an even bigger waste of time, though.

Seems like you have 18,000 more upvotes than downvotes, so maybe you are just in a bad mood today. Deep breath and smile!

I don't give a shit about karma, I do intensely dislike the idea of "piling on" downvotes, for myself or others, as I have expressed many times in the past with regards to others' postings.

It's a great way of discouraging the expression of dissenting ideas. You're correct that I have the 'reserves' to express any number of actual crockpot ideas, but not everyone does.

> This is a great project for learning how to use LLVM because there is nothing to add complexity.

Speaking as someone who's written a very simple Brainfuck interpreter, this is absolutely spot-on. As someone who'd never written an interpreter before, I didn't want to have to think about the language itself, just focus on getting the absolute fundamentals down.

More so, because it's Brainfuck you don't have to worry about people mistaking it for a serious project, so you can concentrate on the educational aspect rather than fine-tuning the performance, fixing every single bug, etc.

oh look! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_arts_sake

Yeah, I don't think of programming as an art, but a craft, so that's why I have the point of view I do.

There are tons of projects that will never go anywhere, done just for learning or as neat hacks, but why ensure that one won't?

It's the same as carpentry and sculpting. It's the same thing, but one is a craft and the other is an art. This guy just took time off making furniture to build a sculpture.

Sure, he could have made a new kind of furniture, but making sculptures also has its merits (or not, depending on your viewpoint, I guess).

Hey, I'm the actual author of this.

I actually work on LLVM-proper during my day job. This was just a fun exercise to demonstrate that it was possible. I also have plans to write a tutorial based on it.

This is an awesome project to look at to learn how to write a JIT. BF is simple enough that it's easy to see what's going on.

Learning is silly and useless?

> Learning is silly and useless?

Yes, that's precisely what I said, isn't it.

Nothing wrong with having some fun now and again.

Not all of our time should belong to others. If it did life would be a dreary experience indeed.

I'm assuming you've been downvoted because slightly more than 50% of HNers think of this project as an artistic/fun project.

But the fact is, even a purely artistic/fun project will have some creativity or originality in it. I would consider a toy language or Brainf__k written for the first time as artistic.

But this project is just a JIT for Brainf__k, there's no creativity in it, and all it did was give the author some experience writing JITs. In that sense this is an exercise project, and IMO exercise projects do not belong to HN.

Does HN censor the "fuck" in "Brainfuck", or was it just you?

EDIT: Ah, it doesn't.

Generally, as long as it's part of something constructive and adds rather than detracts from the message, the community won't downvote profanity. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636262

exercise projects do not belong to [sic] HN

You've used HN for 38 days and you are already saying what kinds of programming articles should and shouldn't be on HN?

Sorry, but this is exactly the sort of thing we should see on HN.

But this project is just a JIT for Brainfuck, there's no creativity in it, and all it did was give the author some experience writing JITs.

How exactly do you define creative?

The author applied his programming skills to create something that didn't exist before. That's creative.

As someone interested in compiler technology, I was happy to see a simple example of a tracing JIT in LLVM. See: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851

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