TrollScript, an esoteric dialect of Brainfuck.

by wlll • 15 years ago

111 42 15 years ago

wlll• 15 years ago

A trollscript interpreter in trollscript:

https://raw.github.com/gist/1204925/743626cf2313690d82243e99...

Have it sung to you on OS X: $(curl https://raw.github.com/gist/1204925/743626cf2313690d82243e99... | say -v "Bad News")

simpsond• 15 years ago

And I thought brainfuck was hard to read... Pretty funny.

jmathes• 15 years ago

Thanks to HN's URL shortener, with a little help from copy-paste, my mac is now singing the page source of github's 404 page

carterparks• 15 years ago

I can't understand why anyone would choose to use this language. Clearly it is unreadable and I highly doubt this scales. Can somebody give me a good reason for using this on my Facebook clone instead of a more mature language such as PHP, Python or Java? Also, I heard somebody was developing a web framework, Trolls under Bridges. Has anybody heard about this?

tombell• 15 years ago

PHP, Python and Java don't have a 'lol' operator!

brodie• 15 years ago

There's Like, Python, which is arguably even more readable than plain Python! http://staringispolite.com/likepython/

lkrubner• 15 years ago

I don't think this is a language people use in real life. It's more for testing. When I went for a job interview at Alexander Interactive http://www.alexanderinteractive.com/ one of the tests they gave me was to write a short bit of code in Brainfuck to reverse a string. The string they gave me was "Hello World". I was allowed to look at the Wikipedia page regarding Brainfuck. They had an interpreter running, into which I could type my code and see the results. I had 15 minutes to make it work.

I think that is where these kinds of languages are used. I think the idea is to test how fast a programmer can learn something new. (For the most part, I'm doubtful about these tests.)

lukejduncan• 15 years ago

Sounds like either they were messing with you; you are messing with us; or Alexander Interactive doesn't respect their applicants

xnxn• 15 years ago

My friend, I believe you've missed the tongue-in-cheek nature of the parent comment (and, in fact, that of Brainfuck itself).

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

beautiful! 12 minutes :

>,[[>,]]<[.<]

edit: of course it should be

>,[>,]<[.<]

ashleymoran2• 15 years ago

I think this is a case of premature optimisation. Trolls under Bridges is struggling to hit v1.0 due to the limited memory capacity of trolls, but someone is hard at work on a Node.js implementation of the interpreter. This will allow spawning a new worker process, or "troglodyte", for each request, and will be totally webscale (there will be no unnecessary trolling for events).

In addition, there's also a JVM port of TrollScript in the works, which will add a static type system to the language for troll-safety. This should alleviate any concerns that the language would be unmaintainable for large systems. JTrollScript will also have type inference to maintain the terseness of the original language.

_3ex7• 15 years ago

Re: Node.js implementation

my buddy has been hacking on this and he says the benefit of being able to troll on the server the same way you troll the client is a huge benefit.

Semiapies• 15 years ago

Sorry, meant to vote up.

wtracy• 15 years ago

The various derivatives of Brainfuck are all joke languages.

That said, Brainfuck originally had an at least interesting purpose: The idea was to create a language that could be handled by the smallest possible compiler.

AFAIK a Brainfuck compiler can be implemented in less code than a compiler for any other Turing-complete language.

Still not practical, but interesting nonetheless.

laconian• 15 years ago

Get back to me when I can write it in an IDE with syntax highlighting and content assist.

cuu508• 15 years ago

Be careful what you wish for!

NickPollard• 15 years ago

How do I parse Trollscript with Regular Expressions?

caiusdurling• 15 years ago

  str.scan(/.{3}|.{1,2}$/).each do |bit|
    process(bit)
  end

hbrouwer2• 15 years ago

Well, there's one for BF:

https://sites.google.com/site/visualbf/

sien• 15 years ago

Has anyone done a proper comparison to Ook ?

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html

ashleymoran2• 15 years ago

The biggest obstacle to me using TrollScript professionally is lack of testing tools. Troll-driven development is a fundamental tenet of XP which I'm not willing to forsake. Is anyone working on TSUnit or TSSpec? In addition, Cuke4Trolls would be a worthwhile project. I'd like to practice behaviour-driven trolling expressed in natural troll language, so TrollScript seems like the perfect target.

overshard• 15 years ago

Part of the troll is that it's programmed on top of Ruby...

saintfiends• 15 years ago

Not another scripting language. Google announcing Dart and now this?. I think I like the syntax improvements though.

EwanG• 15 years ago

As amusing as I find all this, can you imagine what would happen if one of these took off? I had enough trouble several years ago convincing my boss that we really did need to get a copy of Satan... can you imagine trying to even fill out a PO to order 1000 licenses of Brainfuck with the optional TrollScript extension?

BasDirks• 15 years ago

Your trolling is highly inappropriate.

0x12• 15 years ago

Someone (definitely not me) should make a GCTA version of this where the 'codons' map to the 8 opcodes.

Then you can execute any DNA string ;)

jgmmo• 15 years ago

Wow... I never knew a 'Hello World' program could look like this. Mind = Blown.

Trooloolooloolooloolooloolooloolollooooolooloolooloolooloolooooolooloolooloolooloolooloolooloooooloolooloooooloooloolooloololllllooooloololoooooololooolooloolooloolooloololoolooolooloololooooooloololooooloololooloolooloolooloolooloolooloolooloolooloololooooolooolooloololooollollollollollolllooollollollollollollollollloooooololooooolooll.

wollw• 15 years ago

Something inspired me to write a Brainfuck interpreter after reading this so I just put together one in Scheme with a TrollScript compatibility layer. I haven't tested it extensively but it seems to work with everything that I've thrown at it.

https://github.com/Wollw/BrainScript

I wrote it using Guile 1.8.7 and I have no idea if I'm using Guile specific features or not.

edit: Seems it's still a bit broken. The reverse string example in this thread doesn't work for example.

edit2: Well the reverse string example works now. I changed it to read the EOF as equal to 0.

hbrouwer2• 15 years ago

Here's one a friend and I did in Prolog last year:

https://github.com/danieldk/brainfuck-pl

Why? Because it can be done. And actually prolog's tracing mechanism makes debugging brainfuck code quite insightful.

bromagosa3• 15 years ago

I coded one in Pharo Smalltalk last year: http://www.squeaksource.com/BrainFuck.html It's so slow it's almost hilarious. It took it 8 hours to print an ASCII mandlebrot fractal frame, NO KIDDING.

mahrain• 15 years ago

Now compile the Mr. Trololo video transcript and see what Soviet software he was actually transmitting!

aduros• 15 years ago

I work for a company that primarily uses LOLCODE. I've been trying to convince my boss of the benefits of moving to Trollscript, so I wrote this Trollscript interpreter in LOLCODE: https://github.com/aduros/trollcat

bromagosa3• 15 years ago

If I could, I'd upvote you a million times.

bromagosa3• 15 years ago

This is the best thing I've seen in my whole life. Word.

TrollScript, an esoteric dialect of Brainfuck.

Related Stories