Some amusing links on minimalism in programming during the last three decades…
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Greg Lindahl preserved Ed Post’s classic 1983 manifesto, Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal. Of course they didn’t use silly C either, like those modern wimps. Real programmers used FORTRAN IV.
Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements – they make the code more interesting.
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In the late 1980s, Peet Morris wrote The Infinitely Profitable Program
GO.COM. This empty executable simply caused CP/M to restart whatever program had previously been loaded into RAM. £5 per copy for zero bytes of code equals infinite profit! -
Peter van der Zee’s JS1K is an annual competition for working JavaScript programs no longer than 1 KB. There are many amazing submissions, but pay particular attention to Tiny Chess by Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez: an almost complete chess engine that actually plays a decent game!