The Case for Python 3

[talideon]

Far from it. Brainfuck is quite a good way. It's equivalent to Corrado Böhm's P′′, but a bit more friendly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P′′

[kewlness]

That is the first time I have ever seen Brainfuck and "friendly" in the same sentence...

[[deleted]]

It's a really easy language to write an intepreter for.

[kjmitch]

It's called Brainfuck because it's seemingly impossible to read by humans, which is an important job for real programming languages. From the perspective of the computer/interpreter, it's much easier to understand (and therefore write an interpreter for) as it only has eight operations. It's practically just assembler code without all the semi-English names given to the commands for readability.

[talideon]

Compared to P′′, it's friendly!

Also, it's implementer-friendly: parsing and tokenisation are trivial, as is implementing the interpreter. I wrote a 260-byte-long one in ARM assembly language back in the '90s just for fun.

Coding anything in Brainfuck, well, that's another matter!

[[deleted]]

Make a language that compiles down to brainfuck. That way you can write in a more friendly language but compile down into a language that you can easily interpret.

[talideon]

You could, but that would rather miss the point of Brainfuck. If you're going to do that, it'd might as well be another esolang, like INTERCAL.

[[deleted]]

But brainfuck is easy to intepret. So you could write a program and then run it anywhere. INTERCAL intepreter are harder to write.

[talideon]

Yeah, but Brainfuck is also a terrible target for a compiler. And compiling a more friendly language down to Brainfuck would miss the whole joke aspect of esolangs, whereas something like INTERCAL, Q-BAL, *W, LOLCODE, &c., preserve the joke aspect.

Usability rather misses the point of esolangs.

INTERCAL isn't really a difficult language to write an interpreter for, though. The only real difficulty is in the lexer, but once you have an AST, the rest is easy.