Every single day, some dipshit on Twitter tells me that Rust is going to solve memory safety, or that Go is “simple” (it’s not, the goroutine scheduler is a rabbit hole of suffering), or that TypeScript basically IS JavaScript so it counts as a real language (it doesn’t, and you should feel bad). And I’m supposed to just sit there and take it? No. I’m done. I’m absolutely done pretending that any of these languages matter when the superior option has been staring us in the face since 1993.

I’m talking about Brainfuck. And yes, I’m saying it’s the best. Hang your coat up on that beef.

The Eight Commands of God

Let me break this down for people who’ve never actually looked at Brainfuck without immediately closing the tab in terror. The entire language — all of it, every capability this language has ever demonstrated or will ever demonstrate — runs on exactly eight characters:

  • > — move the pointer right
  • < — move the pointer left
  • + — increment the current cell
  • - — decrement the current cell
  • . — output the byte at the pointer
  • , — input a byte to the pointer
  • [ — jump past the matching ] if the current cell is zero
  • ] — jump back to the matching [ if the current cell is nonzero

That’s it. That’s the whole language. Eight symbols. No keywords. No libraries. No package managers. No dependency resolution hell. No 47 megabytes of node_modules that somehow contains a complete copy of the entire npm registry. Just eight characters that, when arranged correctly, can compute literally anything that’s computable.

Some absolute cretin is going to comment “well ackchyually that’s not Turing complete without unbounded memory” and to that I say: eat my entire ass. The spec says infinite. The tape is infinite. It can solve any problem that any other language can solve. The only difference is that you’ll need several hundred lines of increasingly deranged symbols to do what a competent programmer does in ten lines of Python.

Hello, World (One Time)

Here’s the famous Hello World program in Brainfuck:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]
>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++. 
+++.>-.<<+.>++.>+.>++.

That looks like someone dropped a bucket of quarters on a keyboard. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It works. And while you’re still squinting at that trying to figure out what the fuck is happening, I’ve mentally simulated the entire execution and yes, it prints “Hello, World!” followed by a newline.

Here’s what the equivalent looks like in your precious Rust:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, World!");
}

Wow. Four lines. Sixteen words. Two hundred and forty-seven characters including whitespace. Do you know how many characters Brainfuck needed? Two hundred and fifty-one. The difference is statistically negligible, which proves my point exactly: the language doesn’t matter. The output is the same.

Why Brainfuck Is Technically Superior

Now I’m going to make arguments that are going to make several of you very angry, and I need you to understand that this is my intention. I’m here to upset people.

There Is No Syntactic Sugar, Therefore No Lies

Every other programming language is lying to you. “Oh, this async/await syntax makes concurrency easy!” No it doesn’t. It makes your race conditions prettier to look at. “Oh, this list comprehension is idiomatic!” It’s syntactic sugar that obscures what’s actually happening: iteration, allocation, mutation, all wrapped in a bow so you don’t have to think about the machinery.

Brainfuck can’t lie to you. When you write +, you are incrementing a byte. There is no abstraction. There is no hidden state. There is no monad. There is no callback queue. There’s just you, the tape, and the pointer, and if you increment past 255 you wrap around to zero and that’s just how the world works sometimes.

No Dependencies

I need you to understand something: in 2026, the average JavaScript project has fourteen thousand dependencies. Fourteen thousand. That’s more dependencies than there are words in a children’s picture book. And every single one of those dependencies is maintained by some combination of:

  1. A single maintainer in Croatia who’s going through a divorce
  2. An abandoned repo that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration
  3. A person who definitely, definitely definitely did not receive funding from a nation-state to inject malicious code but definitely definitely definitely did

Brainfuck has zero dependencies. It is self-contained. It compiles down to something smaller than yourFrameworkOfTheWeek.min.js, and it was designed that way on purpose in 1993.

Built-in O(1) Everything

Listen, I’m not just saying this because I think it’s funny (I do think it’s funny), I’m saying this because it’s technically true in all the ways that matter:

  • Built-in fast I/O — there’s no buffering strategy to debate, the language is the buffer strategy
  • O(1) time complexity — there’s a finite number of states, so your program either halts or loops forever, and you can mathematically prove which one
  • O(1) space complexity — the tape is bounded, deal with it

The Real Reason People Hate It

They hate Brainfuck because it exposes them. When you write code in Rust, you can hide behind the borrow checker. You can hide behind lifetimes and traits and the warm embrace of a type system that tells you no, actually, you can’t do that. When you write code in Python, you can hide behind the interpreter’s duck typing. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, who are you to question whether it’s a duck?

But Brainfuck gives you nothing. No safety net. No compile-time checking. No IDE autocomplete that finishes your thoughts because it knows what you were going to write before you knew. Just you, the pointer, and eight symbols. If your code is wrong, it’s wrong, and you’ll spend six hours tracing through cell by cell by cell trying to figure out why your loop never terminates.

That’s the real reason people don’t use Brainfuck. Not because it’s impractical. Everything is impractical eventually. Not because it’s hard to read. All code is hard to read after three years; the difference is that in Brainfuck you can’t hide behind the code structure or naming conventions.

They don’t use Brainfuck because it tells them the truth about themselves: that they’re not actually good programmers, they’re just good at using tools that make it hard to write bad code.

Conclusion

Is Brainfuck going to replace your enterprise Java codebase? No. Is it going to power the next unicorn startup? Absolutely not. Is it going to handle your credit card processing? Please God no.

But here’s what I know: when I write Brainfuck, I’m not fighting a package manager. I’m not reading documentation that’s three years out of date. I’m not waiting for seven hundred dependencies to install. I’m just writing code, and the code does a thing, and the thing is correct, and if it’s not correct I can see exactly why.

That’s more than most of you can say about your React apps.

Go ahead. Downvote this. Tell me I’m clinically insane. Link me to the esolang wiki and explain how Malbolge is actually worse. I don’t care. I’ve made my choice. I’ve looked at the landscape of modern programming — the AI slop, the boilerplate, the twelve-factor app configurations that somehow require forty-seven files — and I’ve decided that none of it matters.

Eight symbols. That’s all there is. That’s all there needs to be.