Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People

https://github.com/cmontella/purrtran

by simonpure • 7 months ago

272 37 7 months ago

github.com

Rendello2• 7 months ago

See also: LOLCODE (which has implementations, unlike Purrtran)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

hnlmorg2• 7 months ago

I don’t understand the comparison. Purrtran isn’t an esoteric language.

mananaysiempre• 7 months ago

LOLCODE isn’t much of one either? It’s fundamentally a BASIC more or less.

igleria2• 7 months ago

PURRTRAN allocates all variables to an arena called the "Litterbox". The Litterbox must be manually emptied at least once a day by the user, or Hex's cleanliness and love will decrease. The Litterbox can overflow, which will cause Hex to become very displeased and may lead to unexpected program behavior, as Hex will begin storing variables in your source code text buffer instead of the Litterbox until it's cleaned.

I'm cackling like a madman, thank you for this op.

adzm• 7 months ago

There is no way to observe Hex's internal state directly. You must infer how he is feeling based on his behavior and the lints he provides. This makes it difficult to diagnose issues with Hex's performance or behavior.

this is deep

volemo2• 7 months ago

I wish there were a way to measure a property of the internal state. The measurement would be probabilistic, of course.

tempodox• 7 months ago

The ASCII art cats are great. I wonder whether a canonical purrtran compiler would emit those upon request?

dankobgd• 7 months ago

The future is here

jeberle• 7 months ago

Cat constructed from block: Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, U+1400 to U+167F

  U+14DA  ᓚ CANADIAN SYLLABICS LA
  U+160F  ᘏ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER YO
  U+15E2  ᗢ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER TTU

https://unicode.scarfboy.com/?s=%E1%93%9A%E1%98%8F%E1%97%A2

Rendello2• 7 months ago

Famously used to emulate generics before Go had them:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

type ImmutableTreeListᐸElementTᐳ struct { ... }
If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.

hiduck• 7 months ago

Finally, a good programming language

agrocrag• 7 months ago

Also, language for the youth, CURSED, https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed

echelon_musk• 7 months ago

Is FORTRAN for FOR people?

MisterTea• 7 months ago

Hex will let you know when he is bored by interrupting your work with a note in your terminal

Cats routinely initiate attention grabbing denial of service attacks by blocking access to hardware so this needs proper emulation to increase the realism. I have a few recommendations:

Mouse trapping - when cat pops up the mouse cursor should be limited in motion as if you turned the sensitivity down to near 0. This emulates a cat who lies directly on top of your mousing hand while using said mouse.

Keyboard injection - after cat pops up all further typing results in cat-on-a-keyboard output. This emulates a cat sitting or walking across your keyboard.

Screen jacking - The screen has a cat shaped blank spot that obscures most of your working environment. This can also be paired with cat-on-a-keyboard typing. Emulates cat sitting in front of monitor, likely on top of keyboard.

Once hardware denial fails they move on to destroying your personal items:

destruction of personal items - USB solenoids strategically placed behind any object that you either a. cherish or b. do not want spilled. "That nice book you were just admiring - now it has coffee all over it because I am need something."

I could go on but these are a good starting point.

igleria2• 7 months ago

cat sitting in front of monitor

The famous cat-in-the-middle attack

all2• 7 months ago

I'd rather just get a cat. :D

HowTheStoryEnds• 7 months ago

You obviously need more than 1.. you know for 'scaling and redundancy'. :>

bflesch• 7 months ago

Interesting and creative project. But I wonder if the author suffers from toxoplasmosis / toxoplasma gondii.

tetris11• 7 months ago

Or takes Cordwainer Smith novella's far too literally

jibal• 7 months ago

insane minxes

ZebusJesus• 7 months ago

Not gonna lie this makes me want to learn Purrtran, you have to feed HEX, clean up after them and play with them or else it will misbehave or even die. Hex needs to be happy to help with code, I love it great way to make programming fun! Also pretty cool that they added print and for loop structures that are easier to use.

"In the following example, Hex leaves you a dead baby bunny rabbit because you have unused variables in your code"

zahlman• 7 months ago

I assume all variables are mewtable by default?

monooso• 7 months ago

Okay, fine, you earned the upvote.

marwann• 7 months ago

Very impurrtant work

fractalic• 7 months ago

The rabbit would still be alive if you were a better programmer.

I think that's a brand new sentence

puzzlingcaptcha• 7 months ago

that's just unchecked neurotoxoplasmosis

v-yadli• 7 months ago

I read and giggle to the end with great interest, and now I'm told it's just a joke.

Nyawww!

postit• 7 months ago

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

cmontella• 7 months ago

Thanks for the kind words and keeping the joke going, I laughed at many of these responses. I think they'll make it in to v2.0 which should be out by 4/1

It makes sense that the first thing I'd get to the front page of HN is what amounts to a bad joke :P

mxfh• 7 months ago

𓃠 exists.

theginger• 7 months ago

Seems more of a productivity killer rather than an aid but cats are great marketing. I see no reason not to submit this for YC funding in the next round

modderation• 7 months ago

Can this be generalized into a higher-level metalanguage? Notably, one called FURTRAN with broader support for other fuzzy creatures?

swatson741• 7 months ago

this is really quite interesting to read through after nearly going catatonic thinking about catamorphisms in the Tiger language.

dijksterhuis• 7 months ago

genuinely one of the best submissions i’ve seen in a long time.

pca006132• 7 months ago

I thought this means for category theory people

anyway, quite cute :)

volemo2• 7 months ago

This doesn't mean Hex is wrong, just that he's writing code for an orthogonal plane of existence.

Gonna steal that for myself.

Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People

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