25 comments

  • igleria 23 hours ago
    > PURRTRAN allocates all variables to an arena called the "Litterbox". The Litterbox must be manually emptied at least once a day by the user, or Hex's cleanliness and love will decrease. The Litterbox can overflow, which will cause Hex to become very displeased and may lead to unexpected program behavior, as Hex will begin storing variables in your source code text buffer instead of the Litterbox until it's cleaned.

    I'm cackling like a madman, thank you for this op.

    • adzm 22 hours ago
      > There is no way to observe Hex's internal state directly. You must infer how he is feeling based on his behavior and the lints he provides. This makes it difficult to diagnose issues with Hex's performance or behavior.

      this is deep

  • jeberle 22 hours ago
    Cat constructed from block: Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, U+1400 to U+167F

      U+14DA  ᓚ CANADIAN SYLLABICS LA
      U+160F  ᘏ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER YO
      U+15E2  ᗢ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER TTU
    
    https://unicode.scarfboy.com/?s=%E1%93%9A%E1%98%8F%E1%97%A2
    • Rendello 19 hours ago
      Famously used to emulate generics before Go had them:

      https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

      > type ImmutableTreeListᐸElementTᐳ struct { ... }

      > If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.

  • MisterTea 22 hours ago
    > Hex will let you know when he is bored by interrupting your work with a note in your terminal

    Cats routinely initiate attention grabbing denial of service attacks by blocking access to hardware so this needs proper emulation to increase the realism. I have a few recommendations:

    Mouse trapping - when cat pops up the mouse cursor should be limited in motion as if you turned the sensitivity down to near 0. This emulates a cat who lies directly on top of your mousing hand while using said mouse.

    Keyboard injection - after cat pops up all further typing results in cat-on-a-keyboard output. This emulates a cat sitting or walking across your keyboard.

    Screen jacking - The screen has a cat shaped blank spot that obscures most of your working environment. This can also be paired with cat-on-a-keyboard typing. Emulates cat sitting in front of monitor, likely on top of keyboard.

    Once hardware denial fails they move on to destroying your personal items:

    destruction of personal items - USB solenoids strategically placed behind any object that you either a. cherish or b. do not want spilled. "That nice book you were just admiring - now it has coffee all over it because I am need something."

    I could go on but these are a good starting point.

    • igleria 22 hours ago
      > cat sitting in front of monitor

      The famous cat-in-the-middle attack

    • all2 19 hours ago
      I'd rather just get a cat. :D
      • HowTheStoryEnds 16 hours ago
        You obviously need more than 1.. you know for 'scaling and redundancy'. :>
  • zahlman 20 hours ago
    I assume all variables are mewtable by default?
    • monooso 20 hours ago
      Okay, fine, you earned the upvote.
  • agrocrag 22 hours ago
    Also, language for the youth, CURSED, https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed
  • cmontella 17 hours ago
    Thanks for the kind words and keeping the joke going, I laughed at many of these responses. I think they'll make it in to v2.0 which should be out by 4/1

    It makes sense that the first thing I'd get to the front page of HN is what amounts to a bad joke :P

  • bflesch 20 hours ago
    Interesting and creative project. But I wonder if the author suffers from toxoplasmosis / toxoplasma gondii.
    • tetris11 20 hours ago
      Or takes Cordwainer Smith novella's far too literally
      • jibal 17 hours ago
        insane minxes
  • tempodox 23 hours ago
    The ASCII art cats are great. I wonder whether a canonical purrtran compiler would emit those upon request?
  • postit 19 hours ago
    ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
  • fractalic 20 hours ago
    >The rabbit would still be alive if you were a better programmer.

    I think that's a brand new sentence

  • theginger 16 hours ago
    Seems more of a productivity killer rather than an aid but cats are great marketing. I see no reason not to submit this for YC funding in the next round
  • modderation 15 hours ago
    Can this be generalized into a higher-level metalanguage? Notably, one called FURTRAN with broader support for other fuzzy creatures?
  • marwann 20 hours ago
    Very impurrtant work
  • v-yadli 19 hours ago
    I read and giggle to the end with great interest, and now I'm told it's just a joke.

    Nyawww!

  • pca006132 14 hours ago
    I thought this means for category theory people

    anyway, quite cute :)

  • hiduck 22 hours ago
    Finally, a good programming language
  • swatson741 15 hours ago
    this is really quite interesting to read through after nearly going catatonic thinking about catamorphisms in the Tiger language.
  • echelon_musk 22 hours ago
    Is FORTRAN for FOR people?
  • dankobgd 22 hours ago
    The future is here
  • dijksterhuis 15 hours ago
    genuinely one of the best submissions i’ve seen in a long time.
  • puzzlingcaptcha 19 hours ago
    that's just unchecked neurotoxoplasmosis
  • mxfh 17 hours ago
    𓃠 exists.
  • ZebusJesus 20 hours ago
    Not gonna lie this makes me want to learn Purrtran, you have to feed HEX, clean up after them and play with them or else it will misbehave or even die. Hex needs to be happy to help with code, I love it great way to make programming fun! Also pretty cool that they added print and for loop structures that are easier to use.

    "In the following example, Hex leaves you a dead baby bunny rabbit because you have unused variables in your code"

  • Rendello 3 days ago
    See also: LOLCODE (which has implementations, unlike Purrtran)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

    • hnlmorg 23 hours ago
      I don’t understand the comparison. Purrtran isn’t an esoteric language.
      • mananaysiempre 22 hours ago
        LOLCODE isn’t much of one either? It’s fundamentally a BASIC more or less.
        • hnlmorg 20 hours ago
          …but with intentionally weird semantics picked for its humour rather than legibility.

          It might not be a challenging language, but it is designed more for art than utility.

          This firmly makes it an esoteric language.

          Whereas Purrtran has conventional semantics. The cuteness of Purrtran is in the documentation rather than the language design. The esoteric part is really more in the story telling rather than the language semantics.