Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People | Hacker News Reader

Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People

github.com

272 pointssimonpure37 comments

> PURRTRAN allocates all variables to an arena called the "Litterbox". The Litterbox must be manually emptied at least once a day by the user, or Hex's cleanliness and love will decrease. The Litterbox can overflow, which will cause Hex to become very displeased and may lead to unexpected program behavior, as Hex will begin storing variables in your source code text buffer instead of the Litterbox until it's cleaned.

I'm cackling like a madman, thank you for this op.

> There is no way to observe Hex's internal state directly. You must infer how he is feeling based on his behavior and the lints he provides. This makes it difficult to diagnose issues with Hex's performance or behavior.

this is deep

I wish there were a way to measure a property of the internal state. The measurement would be probabilistic, of course.

Cat constructed from block: Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, U+1400 to U+167F

  U+14DA  ᓚ CANADIAN SYLLABICS LA
  U+160F  ᘏ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER YO
  U+15E2  ᗢ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER TTU

https://unicode.scarfboy.com/?s=%E1%93%9A%E1%98%8F%E1%97%A2

Famously used to emulate generics before Go had them:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

> type ImmutableTreeListᐸElementTᐳ struct { ... }

> If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.

> Hex will let you know when he is bored by interrupting your work with a note in your terminal

Cats routinely initiate attention grabbing denial of service attacks by blocking access to hardware so this needs proper emulation to increase the realism. I have a few recommendations:

Mouse trapping - when cat pops up the mouse cursor should be limited in motion as if you turned the sensitivity down to near 0. This emulates a cat who lies directly on top of your mousing hand while using said mouse.

Keyboard injection - after cat pops up all further typing results in cat-on-a-keyboard output. This emulates a cat sitting or walking across your keyboard.

Screen jacking - The screen has a cat shaped blank spot that obscures most of your working environment. This can also be paired with cat-on-a-keyboard typing. Emulates cat sitting in front of monitor, likely on top of keyboard.

Once hardware denial fails they move on to destroying your personal items:

destruction of personal items - USB solenoids strategically placed behind any object that you either a. cherish or b. do not want spilled. "That nice book you were just admiring - now it has coffee all over it because I am need something."

I could go on but these are a good starting point.

> cat sitting in front of monitor

The famous cat-in-the-middle attack

I'd rather just get a cat. :D

You obviously need more than 1.. you know for 'scaling and redundancy'. :>

I assume all variables are mewtable by default?

Okay, fine, you earned the upvote.

Also, language for the youth, CURSED, https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed

Thanks for the kind words and keeping the joke going, I laughed at many of these responses. I think they'll make it in to v2.0 which should be out by 4/1

It makes sense that the first thing I'd get to the front page of HN is what amounts to a bad joke :P

Interesting and creative project. But I wonder if the author suffers from toxoplasmosis / toxoplasma gondii.

Or takes Cordwainer Smith novella's far too literally

insane minxes

The ASCII art cats are great. I wonder whether a canonical purrtran compiler would emit those upon request?

Not gonna lie this makes me want to learn Purrtran, you have to feed HEX, clean up after them and play with them or else it will misbehave or even die. Hex needs to be happy to help with code, I love it great way to make programming fun! Also pretty cool that they added print and for loop structures that are easier to use.

"In the following example, Hex leaves you a dead baby bunny rabbit because you have unused variables in your code"

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

>The rabbit would still be alive if you were a better programmer.

I think that's a brand new sentence

Seems more of a productivity killer rather than an aid but cats are great marketing. I see no reason not to submit this for YC funding in the next round

> This doesn't mean Hex is wrong, just that he's writing code for an orthogonal plane of existence.

Gonna steal that for myself.

Very impurrtant work

Can this be generalized into a higher-level metalanguage? Notably, one called FURTRAN with broader support for other fuzzy creatures?

Finally, a good programming language

I read and giggle to the end with great interest, and now I'm told it's just a joke.

Nyawww!

Is FORTRAN for FOR people?

I thought this means for category theory people

anyway, quite cute :)

this is really quite interesting to read through after nearly going catatonic thinking about catamorphisms in the Tiger language.

The future is here

genuinely one of the best submissions i’ve seen in a long time.

that's just unchecked neurotoxoplasmosis

𓃠 exists.

See also: LOLCODE (which has implementations, unlike Purrtran)

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

I don’t understand the comparison. Purrtran isn’t an esoteric language.

LOLCODE isn’t much of one either? It’s fundamentally a BASIC more or less.

…but with intentionally weird semantics picked for its humour rather than legibility.

It might not be a challenging language, but it is designed more for art than utility.

This firmly makes it an esoteric language.

Whereas Purrtran has conventional semantics. The cuteness of Purrtran is in the documentation rather than the language design. The esoteric part is really more in the story telling rather than the language semantics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com