a) I'm going to be doing this "work" (which, okay yeah it is) full-time or even constantly, when I'm probably just going to hack on it for the next few months or years; whenever I've got a coding itch. I doubt I'll ever go into crunch mode on this or get "burned out". I'll just put it aside for a while and do something else.
b) That I can't just say "Whelp, it was fun but I'm done" at some point during the project and find something else to do. There's no hardcore commitment here; like all projects, everything beyond the first step is a pipe dream.
I get what you're saying though and it could definitely be a shitton of work that's probably not usable IRL. But it's still a fun plaything.
1) I don't think I'm that crazy, I mean this isn't Temple OS or anything (http://www.templeos.org/).
2) Integers! Strings are integers, arrays are tapes of integers, etc... I guess this means it's dynamic, but at the bottom levels I'm not (yet) concerned with typing.
People are getting touchy because of this response, but let me answer it myself.
To me, coding is like painting or cooking. It's a fun activity done for leisure and self-improvement. I do silly things like code Brainfuck environments because I mostly do these things for me.
I'm not in a startup or building a company because I don't want to give my leisure activity a work stigma. I don't want to code for money because it'll strip away everything I like about programming: the fun of untangling a problem, the casual pace of piecing together a solution and the independence of being able to code whatever I want whenever I want.
In the future I can see myself doing open source projects or writing professionally but I can't see myself coding for 9 to 5 or swapping out my silly activities for a dayjob where I build someone else's thing.
I'm a high-level office contractor, I work six-month contracts in corporate roles. Right now I'm an expediting officer, but I've been many things before that.
Out of curiosity, am I correct (from your follow-up post) that your cell size is 16-bits (integer range of [0..65535]) and that your tape size is only 256?
I suppose it works but convention seems to be 30,000+ bytes and 8-bit cells. Of course, getting pedantic about brainfuck conventions is a bit beside the point (like Orthodox Discordianism). I just want to know if I'm correct and, if so, I'm curious about what is gained through such nonconventional decisions.
I want the core Brainfuck to be as simple and clear-cut as possible. I can implement negative numbers when I get to the assembly stage, and I limited tape size because I'm implementing multiple tapes in the future. I'd rather have many smaller tapes instead of fewer large ones.
That makes a lot of sense. However, I'd still consider your work a success if it broke the 30,000 barrier in cell count. The brainfuck spec says at least 30k cells. It's not an upper limit.
I get why you excluded negative numbers. I was wondering if I was correct in understanding the cell size to be 2 bytes because it's typical for it to be 1 byte.
Am I correct that - on a cell at 0 (or + on a cell at MaxVal) is a no-op, just like < and > at the end of the tape?
Not sure where the sarcasm ends on your blog but if you're really serious about the sponsorship here's what you can do:
1. Setup a fiverr account and post the sponsorship as a $5 gig (the real dollars, US that is ;) )
2. Mention in there you've been recently mentioned on a high-profile news site
3. Post a photo of the traffic stats
4. Profit...
5) !!!
6) I am but a mere mortal, sir.