Exactly. For many, many projects nowadays, the project does not require a 1024 executable because RAM is cheap. Making code that's really easy to work with is just as impressive as this.
No, that's absolutely true. The first computers were for calculating logarithm tables, which were incredibly tedious, slow and error prone for humans to do.
If you're ever in Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, go visit the National Museum of Computing. They'll show you (and you'll get to play with) the Harwell Witch, a decimal computer designed to compete with humans who are using mechanical hand-cranked calculators:
A well-trained human can actually outperform the Witch; for twenty minutes. (They tried it.) But the Witch doesn't make mistakes and it doesn't get tired.
It was only much later that they realised that computers could do things which humans weren't _able_ to do.
I wasn't trying to be. I wasn't saying "yeah, but 'entire point' strictly means... fnar fnar".
I was responding to a point above that seemed to imply that code like this can't be considered great (or at least, no greater than a Rails website), because its not what computers are for. They are for calculating things humans can't. I disagree with that. And not on a pedantic, language level. It is a genuine confusion, i think, between why something was made and what it can do.
Though on re-reading, I may have misinterpreted the OP.
Sorry, I was really just calling out the "real programmers fart assembly in their sleep" sort of stuff. The chess game is certainly an accomplishment, but there are other ways to be accomplished at programming.
The entire point of computers is to be able to do work that would be too tedious for humans. Computers exist so people can be lazy.
Making better programming languages so programmers can be lazy is kind of the whole point of the job.