Essays/A Defence of Brainfuck Derivatives

An essay by User:Hppavilion1

Introduction

Sometimes, I just feel like playing Devil's Advocate. Brainfuck Derivatives are, indeed, a plague on the Esolang community. We have too damn many of them! But what if this wasn't a bad thing? What if BF derivatives are actually useful? This essay aims to study what the good parts of over-deriving brainfuck.

Categorization of Derivatives

There are a number types of Brainfuck derivative. This section will categorize them. It should be noted, however, that a Brainfuck derivative can fall into more than one category.

Minimization

Brainfuck is, as it is, pretty minimal. However, some people aren't cool with that. They try to make it more minimal, which pretty much defeats the purpose of brainfuck being minimal but still usable.

Minimization at the Expense of Computational Class

Particularly bad derivatives of brainfuck minimize so far that they lose computational class and become sub-Turing.

New features

I'm pretty guilty of making these as-is. Some brainfuck derivatives attempt to take brainfuck and add features that aren't necessary to be Turing Complete, such as adding networking support.

Mixins

I've made one of these myself too. Brainfuck derivatives sometimes aim to mix brainfuck with another language, producing "Befuck" or "Brainbolge".

Unique Ideas

Every once in a while a Brainfuck derivative is created which adds something entirely new and unexpected. These are defended in the section "An Existing Base".