The Folders Programming Language

nunodonato

This is so nuts and pointless... I love it! The kind of thing no AI would ever come up with :)

anonymous908213

This is the most truly "WTF is wrong with you" esolang I've ever seen. When I got down to the syntax I imagined the amount of effort it would take to write a single statement and viscerally recoiled.

fxwin

absolutely unhinged, i love it

zzril

Oh, I remember that one from a CTF couple of years ago. Absolutely hilarious!

Surac

Reading the title I immediately thought of rust

usrbinbash

This is...beautiful.

elendilm

My first impression: beautiful and impressive.

jdw64

This idea is so good, though

tensility

Yes, file system metadata takes space. This is so incredibly inefficient.

jghn

s/directories/folders !

customguy

I just mentioned it to Claude and it minus-one shotted (that's when you didn't even want to make anything, just talk about it) a Python script it called Folderol that compiles .fol scripts into folder structures, and it absolutely works. But I can't thank it yet or take it up on the offers on how to follow this up, because that one response put it over from 0% to 90% of the 5-hour usage limit. I'm sure someone with some credits to spend could make this baby sing . Just think of the applications! No seriously, can you please think of any applications and tell me? What are cool things that can contain other things, other than folders? One thing I could think of is hypertext documents, the number of links in them could be the number of folders, and bam, you can now put complex program on the web that take up no space. And rogue agents also have a whole new way to fuck with us, too: while you try to make sense of these weird files they put into these weird folder structures, it's only about the folder structure. Not meaingless data, but active code. Watching. Evolving. Another one is RAM compression, of course. You need some sort of JIT-compiler for the folder code -- which take up no space! -- but then you could make folder programs to store arbitrary data, and store the folder programs in RAM, using no RAM. And why shouldn't those strings themselves be .fol code that compiles to a zero footprint folder structure, right? and so on... yeah, I think you probably get it now.

Hugsbox

"In Windows, folders are an even more extreme measure of emptiness: they take up no disk space at all. For proof, create 352,449 folders and get properties on it." I'm guessing this is a joke and I'm just taking it too seriously, but the only thing that "proves" is that Windows lies to you lol. It's obviously information that's stored _somewhere_.

letharion

I can't decide if I'm in awe, or angry. At least it looks more useful than the flying Tesla.

stronglikedan

> The names of the folders are ignored Oh good, cuz naming things is hard!

TaLiTr

Imagine being the guy trying to figure out why a Windows server is running out of space, and finding 23 million empty folders being used to define software for prod.

omoikane

It says the folders are evaluated in alphabetical order, but actually it's evaluating them in natural sort[1][2]. This makes sense since Windows also displays folders in natural sort order. [1] https://github.com/rottytooth/Folders/blob/015cf65c15ab681f5... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sort_order

classified

Good to see that conventional insanity is still alive and kicking, despite the meteoric rise of AI psychosis everywhere. Besides, the promise of infinite disk space does have magnetic attraction, especially on classic hard disks.

programLyrique

Using the file system structure to make a Smalltalk (Smalltix): https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2025/01/21/... (and the article that followed https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3759429.3762633 )

Nevermark

The Turing machine is the [im-]practical complement: One flat file, one serialized data state, one file position. If only Turing had foreseen folders!