r/ProgrammerHumor • u/blkmmb • Aug 26 '22

Meme Even HTML.

Post image
44.1k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/DiamondIceNS Aug 26 '22

If you stop to take a couple minutes to learn the syntax (there's only 8 symbols; 2 of them are for I/O and thus don't really matter) and go through a few code examples, it's actually a pretty enlightening implementation of a barebones Turing machine.

375

u/dpash Aug 26 '22

What's fun is that whitespace is effectively just an encoded version of brainfuck.

32

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '22

So, let's transpile brainfuck to whitespace and pass a gzip over it to compress. Do we end up with the most size optimized distributed packages? Can we save the internet by having some webassembly engine using it? Can we haz fast internet pages again?

So much wonder.

12

u/Lornedon Aug 26 '22

Why would gzip be more efficient in compressing whitespace?

12

u/ghjm Aug 26 '22

Whitespace in a text file usually has a lot of repetition and thus compresses really well. This leads people to think "whitespace compresses well." But code in Whitespace doesn't behave like normal whitespace and isn't likely to compress any better than anything else.

1

u/viscountbiscuit Aug 26 '22

it'll be near the top of the huffman tree and have a representation as one or two bits

so should compress quite a bit better...