Change the channel

QuantumPulse 2A is confounding on purpose: it takes basic computing principles, the simplest of real CPU instructions, and makes them incredibly difficult. Considerably more confounding than TIS-100 was. A real QWOP of computer programming.

As an illustrative example, the seventh puzzle - which is where I ragequit - challenges you to implement a for loop. One input is the number of expected iterations, so okay, just decrement that and jump/branch back if it's greater than zero. But QuantumPulse doesn't have jumps conditional on the local accumulator register -- only on cross-processor "channel" registers. And a processor can't read from a channel that it's written, only from channels written by other processors.

So the INC/DEC of a loop, and the conditional branching of a loop, need to be done in separate processors linked by synchronized channel communications. And that's just the scaffolding of the loop! The stuff inside a loop will take even more processors!

I've seen this style of intentionally-frustrating programming puzzle before, in Prime Mover. I guess some people are into it? If code golf isn't exciting enough?

This just isn't for me. I can't get past my irritated feeling that, as one Steam reviewer put it, "it's giving you a hammer to put in a screw."