> A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas. Every powerful language has three mechanisms for accomplishing this:
> * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
> * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
> * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Brainfuck is missing any sort of means of abstraction. The primitives are instructions, and the only means of combination is writing instructions in sequence, but there's no way in the language to refer to any sequence of instructions --- no functions, no subroutines, not even labels. This makes it utterly useless as a way to organize your thoughts on how to compute something.
> A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas. Every powerful language has three mechanisms for accomplishing this:
> * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
> * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
> * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Brainfuck is missing any sort of means of abstraction. The primitives are instructions, and the only means of combination is writing instructions in sequence, but there's no way in the language to refer to any sequence of instructions --- no functions, no subroutines, not even labels. This makes it utterly useless as a way to organize your thoughts on how to compute something.
[0] http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/1_002e1.xhtml#g_t1_002...