The classic minimalist esoteric language with only 8 commands, yet Turing complete. Urban Müller , 1993
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Brainfuck was created by Urban Müller in 1993 with a single goal: design the smallest possible compiler. Inspired by FALSE — a language by Wouter van Oortmerssen with a 1024-byte compiler — Müller achieved a working compiler in just 240 bytes for the Amiga OS. The entire language consists of eight commands: > < + - . , [ ]. These manipulate a tape of memory cells and a single pointer, yet the language is Turing complete.
Despite its infamous name, Brainfuck has become the archetypal esoteric language. Writing even trivial programs forces you to think at the level of individual memory cells and pointer arithmetic — an oddly clarifying exercise in understanding how computation actually works at its lowest level. It has inspired dozens of derivatives and remains the most recognised esolang three decades later.