Brainfuck

Brainfuck is an esoteric, minimalist programming language created by Urban Müller in 1993.

Brainfuck is an esoteric, minimalist programming language created by Urban Müller in 1993. It is known for its eight commands, extreme simplicity, and Turing-complete design. The language is intended mainly as a programming challenge rather than for practical software development.

History

Brainfuck was created in 1993 by Urban Müller. Sources describe his aim as producing a Turing-complete language with a very small compiler, especially for constrained systems.

Language design

Brainfuck is built around eight commands that manipulate a memory pointer, modify byte-sized cells, handle input/output, and control loops. The language is intentionally minimal and uses a simple tape-based memory model. Its canonical model uses a one-dimensional tape of memory cells initialized to zero. Cell values wrap modulo 256 in the common abstract machine model.

Turing completeness

Despite its tiny instruction set, Brainfuck is Turing-complete. This means it can simulate general computation in theory, although programs are usually long and difficult to read. Turing completeness is a concept that underlies much of Artificial Intelligence.

Reception and use

Brainfuck is considered an esoteric language used mainly for puzzles, experimentation, and amusement. It is not designed for practical everyday software development, unlike applications such as Microsoft Outlook. It is widely described on Wiki as a Turing tarpit and an esolang.