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Comment by carapace

4 years ago

I was just playing with Nils M Holm's Klong this morning: https://t3x.org/klong/index.html (Klong rather than the others mostly because the C implementation looks like C so I have a ghost of a chance of actually grokking it.)

These folks are really onto something, but I think they get sidetracked in the (admittedly very very fun) minutia of the languages and lose sight of the crucial insight in re: mathematical notation, to wit: it's a means of human communication.

For APL or K to get out of their niches would require, I am convinced, something like a tome of documentation of a ratio of about 1.5 paragraphs per line of code. That would give us mere mortals a fighting chance at grokking these tools.

A similar problem plagues the higher-order stuff they're pursuing over in Haskell land. I know e.g. "Functional programming with bananas, lenses, envelopes and barbed wire" and "Compiling to Categories" are really important and useful, but I can't actually use them unless some brave Prometheus scales Olympus and returns with the fire.

Stuff dribbles out eventually. Type inference and checking have finally made it into the mainstream after how many decades?

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carapace

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jodrellblank  4 years ago

> "would require, I am convinced, something like a tome of documentation of a ratio of about 1.5 paragraphs per line of code. That would give us mere mortals a fighting chance at grokking these tools."

You can download a free PDF copy of Mastering Dyalog APL by Bernard Legrand which is 700+ pages, from here:

https://www.dyalog.com/mastering-dyalog-apl.htm

  • carapace  4 years ago

    That's an amazing reference, but it's about the language, I was thinking more of walk-throughs of code in the language. E.g., for some BQN code: https://t3x.org/klong/klong-intro.txt.html where he explains how a table formatter function works.

    Mathematical equations are usually embedded in papers that explain them. (I mean, I've read papers that were basically equations one-after-another with just scraps of interstitial prose, but they were heavy going.)

    • jodrellblank  4 years ago

      > "There was a better example a couple of weeks ago here in a thread, someone had done a bit of APL or K for Advent of Code or something and posted a line, and someone else broke it down and explained how it worked. I spent an hour just now with Algolia trying to find it but I failed. :("

      It wasn't a couple of weeks ago, but I did that for a line here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30463080

      Or could it have been on an Advent of Code link? There have been some explanations in the answers mega-threads on Reddit. Anyway, yes I agree more explanations would be benficial - and I think there would be room for an animated explainer website with small blocks representing the array elements, coloured by how they are grouped by each primitive operation, and visually showing them moving round and splitting and combining. Such a thing would make a lot more sense for an array language than for many languages.

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