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Comment by jaxxstorm | Hacker News Reader

Since I wrote this article, my colleagues and friends have chipped in with even more absurd examples.

How about some Pascal? https://github.com/jaxxstorm/pulumi-examples/pull/96 Or maybe Emacs Lisp is more your flavour? https://github.com/jaxxstorm/pulumi-examples/pull/95

Or the pièce de résistance: Brainfuck: https://github.com/jaxxstorm/pulumi-examples/pull/97

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TIL that the language I learned to program in (Pascal) is absurd.

Pascal seems somewhat absurd for this particular purpose but that does not at all mean it is, itself, absurd.

Though I learned on BBC BASIC so my idea of what counts as absurd as a first language may, of course, be questionable :D

it occupied a similar niche as go (easy to learn, fast to compile, easy to deploy)

honestly its a shame it fell by the wayside.

How's it feel, old man :)

I'm assuming there's some sort of transpiler to brainfuck? I just cannot stomach the idea that that was written by hand somehow....

Usual strategy is to use a macro assembler and lots of macros to build up some civilized things like stacks and subroutines. But there are also several high level (ish) languages that have compilers to BF.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck_code_generation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

> Although Brainfuck programs, especially complicated ones, are difficult to write, it is quite trivial to write an interpreter for Brainfuck in a more typical language such as C due to its simplicity. There even exist Brainfuck interpreters written in the Brainfuck language itself.

The parent comment was about a transpiler targeting brainfuck, not an interpreter. Writing a brainfuck interpreter (or compiler to x86/etc) is indeed trivial... writing a compiler targeting brainfuck is another beast entirely.

You're right of course. Although I guess some do exist:

https://github.com/arthaud/c2bf https://github.com/felko/bfpy

As my contribution, how about some sugar that DSLifies your perl implementation (should produce the exact same output as your Pulumi.pl on any perl from the last N years, tested on perl5 v24 as I wrote it):

http://hermit1.scsys.co.uk/~matthewt/pulumi

(for anybody uninterested in my perl stupidity, please skip to the 'use Pulumi;' line which is the start of the actual user written code - everything before that would in a sensible world be a library but I wanted to present the example as a single file so chose violence ;)

The ELisp version is quite nice.

Why is Emacs lisp absurd ? It’s an editor that is widely popular .

Maybe “unexpected” would be a good substitute for absurd.

It's not even that. There are several k8s packages on MELPA and they are meant for real use rather than a blog joke.

And JSON support in Emacs is not some obscure feature these days, it's heavily relied on by many popular packages.

Dynamic scoping.

Not saying it’s without utility, but to the mainstream: pants on head bonkers.

Emacs has supported lexical binding for almost a decade now and all the elisp files in Emacs itself use it. Most modern packages do too.

Bash "local" variables (advanced feature not even in the POSIX shell standard) are dynamically scoped.

Head on bonkers boots embedded systems and servers, coordinates builds, ...

Moreover, the specific example looks great.

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