I suspect, though I could be wrong, that the Chris Morris who worked on Whitespace at Durham is this guy - https://www.dur.ac.uk/cis/about/person/?id=4018 and is not the famous comedian, though I personally have never seen them in the same room at the same time.
Many of you reading this may have overheard (or participated in) a conversation like this while studying CS or something related:
"Hey, so what language did you use for the assignment?"
"...Java. I don't know. I was going to use C but I don't care, I just wanted to be done with it, you know?"
"Yeah but the assignment LITERALLY said you could use ANY programming language as long as the guy can execute your code, right?"
"Okay? So?"
"You know what Steve did? He wrote it in BRAINFUCK. HAHAHAHA."
"Whaaat? Haha!"
"You know what BRAINFUCK is?"
"Uh... no, what? Haha."
"It's like this... like a two-dimensional Turing machine or something and only uses special characters and it's almost impossible to read! But it's a Turing machine so it can do everything any other programming language can do!"
"And it's literally called Brain-Fuck?!? Hahaha!"
"Yeah! Hahaha I wish I could have seen the look on the guys face who had to execute and test it but you know they said any programming language is okay so they totally have to do it!"
In my CS assignments I couldn't choose the languages.
The only thing was the seminar "current programming languages" where everyone had to do a talk about a language of his choice. I did "The Shakespeare Programming Language".
Brainfuck is kinda cool because it provides such a minimal language with which to practice writing interpreters and even compilers (or a JIT, as with RPython). But it's kinda uncool because of the name and its obtuse syntax.. so anyone know of a similarly minimal language that's more readable?
* The benefits it offers over C++ are (or were) not significant enough to make people invest in the switch
* Library availability lacked compared with C++
* It is unsure whether there is "Garbage Collection", and whether it is optional.
* It's not backed by a big name - and our industry is obsessed with big names.
* Perhaps a lack of literature and interest by academic institutions to teach it.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692230