So last night at about 11:00, a friend and I had the brilliant idea that we wanted to write our own derivative of the esoteric programming language brainf**k, and we wanted to implement the interpreter in Rust. Our tired minds devised the masterful scheme that we just had to make every command an emoji. By the end of our 24-hour programming extravaganza, we have a fully working brainf**k dialect where every command is an emoji, and a website hosted at emotifuck.rs.

The language itself essentially operates as a Turing machine; there are commands to move along 1024 individual cells for memory, commands to read/write from standard IO, and commands to allow for conditional loops and branches. The language itself mostly operates my moving along the data “tape” and placing/modifying values that it then prints to standard output. For example, to print out an “A” the program would need to increment a single memory location 65 times (65 being the ASCII value for the character “A”) then place it in standard output. The language is technically Turing-complete, meaning that it can be a valid expression of any mathematically-defined function, but is a real pain to program in.

So why would we do this?

We’re really not sure either.

“One day, a thousand years from now, people will discover Emotif**k. And they will think, ‘what the f***?’” - InsidiousMind