I think the best approach for the Brainfuck madness is to write a compiler/transpirer from a high level language (e.g. LOLCODE) to generate Brainfuck code. Then you can write your app in the high level language and show off the generated Brainfuck code.
It's really cute how the author added $ to insert a debugging break into the source. Instead of "debugging by printf", which is a bit tedious in brainfuck, this is driving your debugger by editing the source code. Bravo!
I recently learned you can do a similar thing with C/C++ too. Programmatically raise a SIGINT when running under gdb, and gdb will intercept that signal, at which point you can step through the code.
I was laughing in a good way, it's always cool to see not only the "thing" but how it was debugged.
As for python, I debug it by adding print() statements. No debugger involved. If there's a way to insert debugger breakpoints in the source, I'm unaware of it.
I'd really like to see that. I'm eager to build a small program that takes style offenses like nested ternary operators and replaces them with a still functional brainfuck equivalent, to highlight how anoying that style of programming is to read.
I mean yeah but this is javascript. Only 3 phases of transpilation is for noobs.
brainfuck->typescript->es6->via babel->es5->postCss plugins->sass->css->transpiled to react components->transpiled to an Angular 2 project->to webcomponents->transpiled to ArnoldC language->transpiled to a Turing complete Shopify liquid template-> commonjs and browserified->rails sprocket pipeline->then piped to /dev/null
I was surprised to learn that this has got to be one of the only languages which is easier to compile than interpret. When compiled the language reduces to basically a single-register assembly with a one-to-one character-to-line ratio. Bracket branching can be extremely easily implemented with jump labels and `test` + `jnz` statements without having to worry about things like parsing and jump table construction at all.
It's pretty freaking easy to interpret, as well... I implemented an interpreter in Go (which I had never used before) in an hour or so; most of the time spent was learning the two languages (Go and BF).
I should start asking interview candidates to write a BF interpreter...
So delighted to see this :D
I once fail/won with a paper in whitespace. I love the non-traditional programming languages. They're fun, whimsical, and sometimes a nice break.
LOLCode is still my favorite though. I wrote a prime number generator in it for fun :)
The not being afraid of going unconventional ways refers to the levels of sauerbraten being stored in octrees. This is quite tough too edit if you are used to 3dsmax and blender. Actually that was too much effort- thus the project never came to be- but the way its stored and accessed, is blazingly fast and effective. One has to admire this skills.
