Obfuscated Erlang (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Obfuscated Erlang (2012)

ferd.ca

87 pointsQuinnWilton14 comments

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Lol, this reminds me of Erlang: The Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE

Thanks for posting that; the output clearly makes more sense if you’re familiar with the movie.

And just in case you missed it, — Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ

One of the comments in the code states

> According to many Haskellers, type signatures represent sufficient documentation.

And then:

> %% I am ... %% learning ... %% cabbage

You surely do. Hmm, so much wisdom in all this

The "texture" of the code reminds me a bit of the JJencode/JSFuck[1] JavaScript obfuscator --- lots of repetitive patterns and the same concept of building bigger and more complex pieces from recursive applications of very trivial rules.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck

Macros are expanded at compile-time, yes? If so, does that mean you can have obfuscation with zero runtime overhead?

Yes and yes.

if you like obfuscated BEAM languages, back when the eeee thing was a thing, I wrote this:

https://gist.github.com/isaac-rstor/8bab8a47f6848613d7a23092...

Just for the reference of us brats that don't know what "the eeee thing" was, could you please enlighten us?

It's a GitHub repository with a name consisting of 132 'e's, the maximum limit on GitHub [0][1].

People started contributing more and more esoteric code to print 'e' repeatedly in their favourite programming language. Eventually the repository was disabled, and the author got into a long-winded discussion with GitHub. Eventually the repository was archived [2].

[0]: https://github.com/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/eeeeeeee...

[1]: https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/e98e/

[2]: https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/everything-that-lives-is-de...

As one currently slowly and gradually undertaking learning Erlange—that was... inspirational? Definitely hilarious.

So this is like quadratic obfuscation.

Is this a joke about regular Erlang's readability? :D

Bravo

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