Comment by smcl

4 years ago

Good to know re the name, I typed it out a couple of times and wondered if I was just doing something stupid. I really wasn't trying to formulate an attack on this style, if someone or some organization uses it and it works then more power to them. I was really just trying to understand a bit better, but it's possible that is something that I can only really get by experience.

So I find APL, J, K and friends quite fascinating (and J is on my list to try) but I haven't seen much hostility to them. People understandably get a bit intimidated by how different it is but they usually still seem curious. The real hostility is reserved for Whitney C. In this case I don't think it's like - if you'll forgive me for abusing that human language metaphor a bit - an English speaker learning Russian, more like

    ifAnEnglishSpeakerEncountered
    aLocaleWhereEnglishIsWrittenA
    ndStructuredDifferentlyToWhat
    theyWereUsedToSomethingLikeTh
    is.

I can understand why their instinct is to recoil in horror and think "I already know a more standard English, I'm currently learning Russian and Japanese ... I have little patience for trying out this alternate form of English". It's obviously an exaggerated/contrived example, but this is genuinely how that C code appears to an outsider at first blush (or at least it did to me and a couple of my friends).

That said your replies have piqued my interest, I'm gonna have to properly dig through that ngn/k repo some day. If I turn into a Whitney C guy then I'm holding you responsible :D

2 comments

smcl

foxfluff 4 years ago

Yep. It's mostly a knee jerk reaction.

After accustomization with a style that doesn't force explicit declarations of identifiers and their types, verbose type conversions, line breaks and indentation after every statement and brace, etcetra., one could definitely make a different (and similarly exaggerated) human language metaphor. For example, take some English text and feed it through a parser. Feels good to read?

    (S (NP Parsing)
       (VP refers
           (PP to
               (NP (NP the activity)
                   (PP of
                       (S (VP analysing
                              (NP a sentence)
                              (PP into
                                  (NP its component categories and functions))))))))
       .)

That's a bit how mainstream languages feel after using something that hasn't been forced into such an artificial form :) If you're willing to let go of that, you can write sentences and clauses on the same line, almost like prose!

smcl 4 years ago

Hehe that's actually a nice way to put it. So it's a little bit like the red pill, you can't really go back after going embracing Whitney C :D