Comment by frankjr
1 year ago
I don't understand how. How do you debug something this? How do you go about fixing a bug? There are no docs nor tests. It seems like one would spend hours just trying to understand what's going on. Is there a good source on their methodology? Because my mind is blown.
Try J or APL, K, BQN, or April, and be prepared to rethink how you implement solutions to problems you've tackled in other PLs. I am an array language user and fan. I have been playing with April and I use J regularly at home and sometimes for work when I can.
From the April github site: "April compiles a subset of the APL programming language into Common Lisp. Leveraging Lisp's powerful macros and numeric processing faculties, it brings APL's expressive potential to bear for Lisp developers. Replace hundreds of lines of number-crunching code with a single line of APL."
I recommend checking out more of the APL family language family and the history of the notation, highly interesting. Almost like a parallel universe of computing, when you look past the syntax.
Yes, but C isn't APL. I don't buy it that this how it was written from day 1. Occam's razor and all, this is obfuscated C, not code written by an alien superintelligence.
Whitney is famous for writing code like this, it's been his coding style for decades.
For example, he wrote an early J interpreter this way in 1989. There's also a buddy allocator he wrote at Morgan Stanley that's only about 10 lines of C code.
https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
https://github.com/tavmem/buddy/blob/master/a/b.c
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haven't you ever written code with single letter variable names and it makes sense to you? and then been forced to read somebody else's code with single character variable names and found it completely inscrutable? this is just that on (a lot of) steroids
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You do actually spend hours to understand what's going on. Basically, the idea is that your implementation will be so short and condensed that you'll just rewrite from scratch to fix bugs.
The environment is very interactive. It also helps when you can fit do much more on screen, quite possibly the entire program.
Using a debugger is basically out of the question. The theory is that the conciseness and lack of fluff makes it easier to reason about once you’ve mustered the requisite focus.