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by chris_wot 25 days ago
Not more obscure than Brainfuck.
1 comments

What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.
And it’s also a reinvention of Corrado Bohm’s P’’ which is even more seminal
Could you use it in production?
From Cambridge dictionary:

obscure (adjective)

not known to many people:

- an obscure island in the Pacific

- an obscure 12th-century mystic

Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.

If you quote the dictionary to win an argument, quote it in full. There are two definitions of obscure in the Cambridge dictionary. The other is:

obscure (adjective)

not clear and difficult to understand or see:

- Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.

- His answers were obscure and confusing.

- "the syntax itself is obscure"

Pretty sure caveat intended for the former definition.
I could use (and have used) Körber/HighJump Advantage Architect in production, and yet that's nonetheless so far from notable that Körber's own Wikipedia page doesn't even bother to mention its acquisition of HighJump and the software products thereof, let alone the proprietary graphical programming language which HighJump's customers use to configure and customize their flagship warehouse management system.

Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.