alt Hacker NewsI wonder at what level you could enforce/how far you could take the idea of "don't allow invalid states to be represented" to a programming language, to prevent this kind of language debauchery.
C does seem to sit at the perfect intersection of language age and low-level access to allow this kind of competition, whereas something like Go seems far less suited for it. Javascript is routinely obfuscated pretty well for human readers. I'm not familiar enough with Rust to say, but I bet with what little I know of its syntax you could create some pretty ugly stuff?
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You can write programs of a similar spirit in most languages. C has a programming culture that's much more tolerant of it than say, Python though.
Zig could probably support a similar contest as it grows up.
I used to write obfuscated C for fun. I haven’t touched it in a while, but as I recall there are really two C syntax features that unlock most of the “magic”. Whitespace is generally not significant, so you can cram a whole lot onto a single line. And the combination of pointers and weak typing lets you be as anarchist as you like about manipulating data. (Oh, and the preprocessor. The one and - thankfully - only C preprocessor.)
Of the two^H^Hhree, I think that the first is what contributes most to the aesthetic appeal of obfuscated C. The only other languages I’ve used that are as good for making code that looks impenetrable are Forth and JavaScript, both of which share that feature.
(Probably any lisp, too, but for some reason I’ve never actually tried. I can say, though, that the most confusing codebase I ever inherited was written in Clojure.)
So yes, I’m inclined to agree that Rust can be a good language for writing deliberately ugly code, and Go not so much. But for a different, perhaps more trivial reason.
With macro rust can surely produce some creative stuff
Typechecking is more less picking a decidable set of invalid programs and making an efficient checker for them. As for ruling out programming styles, a language is, after all, Turing complete, so one could write an IR and an interpreter and then encode the rest of the program in the IR...
Personally, while I see the social advantages of having all code in one language be similarly structured and use the same idioms, I think a language is meant to be used, and it should offer all the building blocks for writing programs in whatever is the most natural way.