Ben looked horrified. "Why would anyone do that?"

Ben checked his watch. "So how do we get the real data? We need the final population numbers for 57 cities by noon." Elara opened her toolkit. "We don't fight popdata.bf . We run it. Brainfuck is a language, not a corruption. Let me show you how to be helpful to your future self."

City,Population Avalon, 84521 Bristol, 120044 Cantown, 35209 ... "It worked!" Ben cheered. "But how did you know?"

"I can’t open it. Excel crashes. My Python script throws a UnicodeDecodeError . Even cat in the terminal just spits out nonsense: ++++++++++[>+>+++>+++>++++++<<<<-]>++.>+.>---. "

bf popdata.bf > population_data.txt The command ran for half a second. A new file appeared: population_data.txt . Ben opened it. Inside were clean, perfect rows:

One Tuesday morning, her colleague, Ben, rushed over. "Elara, the quarterly census report is due in three hours. But the master population file, popdata.bf , is… weird."