Brainfuck
Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Urban Müller. Notable for its extreme minimalism, the language consists of only eight simple commands, a data pointer and an instruction pointer.
| Paradigm | Esoteric, imperative, structured |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Urban Müller |
| First appeared | September 1993 |
| Typing discipline | Typeless |
| Filename extensions | .b, .bf |
| Influenced by | |
| P′′, FALSE | |
| Influenced | |
| Malbolge | |
Brainfuck is an example of a so-called Turing tarpit: it can be used to write any program, but it is not practical to do so, because Brainfuck provides so little abstraction that the programs get very long or complicated. While Brainfuck is fully Turing complete, it is not intended for practical use, but to challenge and amuse programmers. Brainfuck requires one to break commands into microscopic steps.
The language's name is a reference to the slang term brainfuck, which refers to things so complicated or unusual that they exceed the limits of one's understanding, as it was not meant or made for designing actual software but to challenge the boundaries of computer programming.
Because the language's name contains profanity, many substitutes are used, such as brainfsck, branflakes, brainoof, brainfrick, and BF.