The Groot Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Groot Programming Language

github.com

103 pointsthiagopnts40 comments

Even though I got a laugh out of it, I propose we change the definition of esoteric programming languages to require more creativity from their designer than reimplementing brainfuck with different tokens for the operators.

This. Flagged the submission.

Why are you flagging this? Flagging is for topics that are "spam or offtopic."

Is it on topic?

Somebody wrote a new language/turing machine based off of pop culture, I'd say that's pretty on-top for HackerNews.

So, by your point of view, I should be able to submit the "Moo!" or "Ook!" esoteric languages which are exactly like this one?

I find Groot to be entirely uninteresting. Look up Homespring or Flip :)

> So, by your point of view, I should be able to submit the "Moo!" or "Ook!" esoteric languages which are exactly like this one?

Yes, and they'd be on-topic. Though Zombie [0], from the same creator as Ook!, is probably more interesting.

[0] http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/zombie.html

Is not based in brainfuck, its a turing machine, and both look that way because any less instructions are not enough for programming a digital computer.

Converting from groot to brainfuck requires simply a 1-1 command translation. It doesn't matter if these are turing machine operations, the point is that there is nothing 'esoteric' about writing down what a turing machine does using a language that everyone already knows.

If I rewrote C to use BEGIN and END instead of { and }, then that's not inventing an esoteric language, but new syntax for an existing language.

The type of abstract syntax trees of this language and brainfuck are isomorphic. There are lots of definitions of what a "Turing Machine" is. If we take the one on Wikipedia as canon it isn't the same as this.

In particular, a Turing Machine is a model while both Brainfuck and Groot are languages. It's easy to see how each of these languages is directly translated into a Turing Machine model (providing them a choice of semantics). Indeed, due to their isomorphism we need only translate one of them to have a faithful translation of the other "for free".

Better yet, Brainfuck and Groot both have a privileged semantic model which is more or less identically a Turing Machine (except Brainfuck merely specifies that the tape is at least 30,000 bytes long and Groot mentions site not at all while Turing Machines are explicitly infinite).

So, they're really closely related to a Turing Machine but honestly separate things more closely related to one another (via isomorphism) than to TMs directly (via semantic mapping).

You only need one instruction for a computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

I propose a law of esoteric langauges:

If there exists, in popular culture, a character with a comically limited vocabulary (e.g. Groot, The Librarian in Discworld) then there shall be a Brainfuck variant based on its vocabulary. (In our example, Grootlang and Ook)

Supporting evidence: https://github.com/mikar/hodor

That gives us one language for every Pokemon (i.e pika pika, pik pikachu, pikachuuu, pikachu!)

Arguably you're only counting the lower bounds. There are many Pokémon that have at least two different languages (based on English and Japanese names).

That's easy.

Now, automating that by putting enough NLP together to scan social media and news sites to classify popular characters with a comically limited vocabulary and automatically generate a Brainfuck variant based upon said character's vocabulary? That's the hard part... ;)

I've never really understood why Groot stopped being able to say more than his name - he could talk just fine until 2008 or so:

http://13thdimension.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/acstarlo...

(On the other hand, the fully-talking character was a bit of a jerk, so perhaps it's better this way.)

It's a size thing. When he's big, his vocal cords are too stiff to really sound like anything other than 'I am Groot'.

But, to be fair, the earlier version is based on Groot being a monster, a villain. They re-imaged a lot of the Guardians of the Galaxy to have a more proper spaced based origin.

It doesn’t have generics.

As long as I can implement a webserver in it.

You can't (at least not without non-portable extensions), but you can write cgi scripts.

Generics would hamper its speedy compilation time.

Yet another brainfuck with different tokens. Can we show some more creativity?

I prefer ArnoldC: https://github.com/lhartikk/ArnoldC

Had a look at the code because I also happen to be playing around with Rust. The author seems to be struggling with strings and borrowing/lifetimes like the rest of us. Between splitting to words and tokenizing, there are probably 3 copies of the input string in memory.

  i am Groot

(i.e. +1 for the effort)

It's missing the essential keyword "We". I'd submit a patch but I'm too drunk right now.

The last line of the spec (or near it at least).

"Groot" is Dutch for big; until I followed the link, I was wondering if it were actually about C++. (OTOH, that would be "grootste", wouldn't it?)

Even though his usual working language is Smalltalk, I'm sure Cees de Groot would appreciate. :)

I would think "We are Groot" would be better as the command to accept one byte of input.

Someone needs to (not me, I'm an idiot) a VM to run it on called "Diesel".

I refuse to use this unless it has a javascript compiler.

Just want to point that this is just the basic instructions of a Turing machine, therefore this language is complete and equivalent to any other Turing-complete language.

it looks pretty enterprise ready

_ => boom

Meh. Good effort, I guess.

I'm not sure why this is on hn. The creation of a programming language using a stupid syntax has been done, and has been done better. This adds nothing to the space, and it's the useless language equivalent of hello world. Good for you, you made your first hello world that is completely useless. But my hello world doesn't end up on hn, and nor should this.

You're probably not, but you sound as if you're just jealous... You could phrase your comment better.

On topic: I too don't think "another brainfuck interpreter" is very interesting, but I enjoyed sort-of-a-compiler for brainfuck implemented here: https://www.hashcollision.org/brainfudge/ by Danny Yoo. You can get something out of even the most useless of examples sometimes :)

I'm immensely jealous of anyone who has that much free time. I guess as a show-hn, I'm all for this. Someone wants to do this, then it's their art or stress relief and they're doing it for fun. But as a news submission, I don't feel this adds anything other than it's association with a popular movie. BrainFudge however, I really like.

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