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.
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
