[redrobein]

Well the example _is_ building a brainfuck interpreter. I guess this is the perception that comes with having minimal syntax like this, but it's probably also a functional requirement. Would recommend people read the whole thing before putting it off as a joke.

[ret2pop]

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).

[BoiledCabbage]

I think it's a really beautiful and innovative thing you've made here. And you should be proud of it.

I think a lot of people on HN nowadays can only see the world through the lens of Javascript and as a result really can't appreciate what this is.

[vidarh]

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.

[ret2pop]

Oof. I'll fix that in some time.

[jihiggins]

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