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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

It would be different, if somehow all those 84688 regexes were coded by hand. Then it would be a piece of art.

It would be different, if the number of regexes was maybe below 300, and it still plays acceptably. The sheer number of regexes kind of defeats the purpose.

At that code size, a much better engine can be written, or other kind of code for an engine be generated. Regexes themselves are not really something we should strive to use more either. Maybe its intentional badness kind of makes it art?

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This is a quintessential, crazy idea that used to be adored on HN. The author, obviously, didn't intend this to be a serious engine.

I wish more submissions began with, “This might be a bit wild, but I wanted to see if it could actually work.”

Out of curiosity, why wouldn't it work?

Oh, I didn't mean that this specific project wouldn't work. I just wish HN were a little friendlier towards projects that are primarily thought experiments.

Some of the best things I've ever created started from, "I wonder what would happen if I tried this crazy approach..."

I think it’s because of agent involvement. It takes away the coolness.

> “This might be a bit wild, but I wanted to see if it could actually work.”

That is how esoteric programming languages start.

What a depressing way to view the world. Sorry this great project wasn't to your taste, but there's no reason to be a dick about it.

> Maybe its intentional badness kind of makes it art?

I guess it's the whole point of such type of blog posts. Similarly, some people write complicated interactive web pages without using JS, like this https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/. But if you look at the HTML / CSS code size, it's usually huge, but still requires creativity to do that because of constraints. Obviously, it's not something practical or even optimal.

> Similarly, some people write complicated interactive web pages without using JS (…) Obviously, it's not something practical or even optimal.

There are people who navigate the web with JavaScript turned off, so those experiments do have practical applications.

There are entire projects around not using JavaScript.

https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/

https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-JavaScript

> There are people who navigate the web with JavaScript turned off, so those experiments do have practical applications.

This is practical (and necessary) for relatively basic stuff, such as text content, navigation, basic form / input validation, and things like that. But when people write more complicated things (requiring state management, logical branches, etc), like games, 3d programs, etc, it's much more challenging (also can be sub-optimal) and requires more creativity. I mean they are more of a demo art rather than some strong necessity.

I was also thinking along the same lines. Interesting, but I'm not sure in which aspect it is an achievement, considering the loop isn't a regex.

Meanwhile, 1K ZX Chess takes fewer bytes of memory than the first four paragraphs from the post.

You completely missed the point of the article. It's the equivalent of compiling C++ to a Turing machine. Not practical, not optimum, but freaking amazing. Maybe think about it as an art project.

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