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Comment by rukuu001 | Hacker News Reader

The "bootstrapping code for a very minimal syntax" reads like a practical joke. Their mention of Brainfuck set expectations appropriately:

  ldfgldftgldfdtgl
  df 
  
  dfiff1 crank f

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Well the example _is_ building a brainfuck interpreter. I guess this is the perception that comes with having minimal syntax like this, but it's probably also a functional requirement. Would recommend people read the whole thing before putting it off as a joke.

Indeed. I am the writer of this blog post and Matthew and I never intended for this to be a joke. In fact, we thought we had programmed something unique that nobody had done before, and the bootstrapping code syntax is minimal by design (you don't want to assume a default complicated syntax).

Since you're here, note that I can't resize your text on Chrome on Android by default, and so I can't read your page on my phone at all without my glasses without switching the browser to desktop mode.

Oof. I'll fix that in some time.

I think it's a really beautiful and innovative thing you've made here. And you should be proud of it.

I think a lot of people on HN nowadays can only see the world through the lens of Javascript and as a result really can't appreciate what this is.

i think you might lose people in the transition from the turing tape machine style bootstrapping to using full "words" for operations. it might help to compare it to something like regexes? (obviously they're not similar in the way that forth / stack langs are, but they're more commonly known and more commonly thought of as useful)

i think it'd also help a lot to have some gifs of the state machine operating on stuff

or maybe you could have something with "syntax" highlighting. a navigable timeline that changes the highlighting based on the current ignore lists and / or stack contents as you step through the code could be neat

As mentioned elsewhere I think they do themselves a disservice by starting there, instead of starting with a reasonable set of delimiters etc., and then referring to an aside that explains how to bootstrap to that point. The lowest levels get too esoteric for most.

It's a bit like being taught functional programming by starting with composing everything from combinators, including church numerals for numbers. Sure, knowing those bits is worthwhile theory, but not until you're convinced about the higher level utility.

yo check out this cool new program i wrote:

    ajksbdnfjasdnflaksdfbnf

I love the irony of proposing someone program like this without spelling mistakes immediately after a paragraph containing a spelling mistake.

I think I'd rather just learn Assembly... Lol this is comical to look at, but wow.

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