HN

Comments (34)

• Nevermark
  The Turing machine is the [im-]practical complement: One flat file, one file position.Imagine what a folders of folding-tapes Turing machine could achieve! Information containment structures and tunneling! Or a real mess!
• 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 )
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  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_.
• 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
• nunodonato
  This is so nuts and pointless... I love it!The kind of thing no AI would ever come up with :)
• letharion
  I can't decide if I'm in awe, or angry.At least it looks more useful than the flying Tesla.
• 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.
• stronglikedan
  > The names of the folders are ignoredOh good, cuz naming things is hard!
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  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.
• zzril
  Oh, I remember that one from a CTF couple of years ago. Absolutely hilarious!
• usrbinbash
  This is...beautiful.
• Surac
  Reading the title I immediately thought of rust
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  tensility
  Yes, file system metadata takes space. This is so incredibly inefficient.
• jdw64
  This idea is so good, though
• fxwin
  absolutely unhinged, i love it
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  jghn
  s/directories/folders !
• 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.
• elendilm
  My first impression: beautiful and impressive.
• jan_m_savage
  noice!
• veexx103
  [dead]
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  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.