Comment by thristian

4 months ago

APL and K are still pretty daunting, but I've recently been dabbling in Lil[1], which is something like a cross between K and Lua. I can fall back on regular procedural code when I need to, but I appreciate being able to do things like:

    127 * sin (range sample_rate)*2*pi*freq_hz/sample_rate

This produces one second audio-clip of a "freq_hz" sine-wave, at the given sample-rate. The "range sample_rate" produces a list of integers from 0 to sample_rate, and all the other multiplications and divisions vectorise to apply to every item in the list. Even the "sin" operator transparently works on a list.

It also took me a little while to get used to the operator precedence (always right-to-left, no matter what), but it does indeed make expressions (and the compiler) simpler. The other thing that impresses me is being able to say:

    maximum:if x > y x else y end

...without grouping symbols around the condition or the statements. Well, I guess "end" is kind of a grouping symbol, but the language feels very clean and concise and fluent.

[1]: https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html

12 comments

thristian

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fainpul  4 months ago

I assume this is the same as this?

  # python
  [127 * sin(x * tau * freq / samplerate) for x in range(samplerate)]

  • zahlman  4 months ago

    For that matter,

      # python
  from numpy import sin, arange, pi
  127 * sin(arange(samplerate) * 2 * pi * freq / samplerate)

    • kelas  4 months ago

      for that matter, i always wonder how people mistake python for numpy :) they have surprisingly little in common.

      but enough talking about languages that suck. let's talk about python!

      i'm not some braniac on a nerd patrol, i'm a simple guy and i write simple programs, so i need simple things. let's say i want an identity matrix of order x*x.

      nothing simpler. i just chose one of 6 versions of python found on my system, create a venv, activate it, pip install numpy (and a terabyte of its dependencies), and that's it - i got my matrix straight away. i absolutely love it:

        np.tile(np.concatenate([[1],x*[0]]),x)[:x*x].reshape(*2*[x])

      and now lets see just how obscure and unreadable exactly the same thing looks in k:

        (2#x)#1,x#0

      no wonder innocent people end up with brain aneurisms and nervous breakdowns.

      5 replies →

  • thristian  4 months ago

    Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that in Python the function that calculates a single value looks like:

        foo(x)

    ...while the function that calculates a batch of values looks like:

        [foo(x) for x in somelist]

    Meanwhile in Lil (and I'd guess APL and K), the one function works in both situations.

    You can get some nice speed-ups in Python by pushing iteration into a list comprehension, because it's more specialised in the byte-code than a for loop. It's a lot easier in Lil, since it often Just Works.