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Always nice to see more open-source K implementations. Are array languages finally seeing some much-deserved attention?
by RodgerTheGreat 11y ago
Always nice to see more open-source K implementations. Are array languages finally seeing some much-deserved attention?
- agumonkey 11y agoI just had an APL day last week. gnu-apl + emacs apl-mode was pretty fun. Array based thinking with repl like interaction.. gosh what a bliss.
- RodgerTheGreat 11y agoOnce you get past the initial learning curve, array algorithms are a wonderfully natural way to think about problem solving. The toolkit you get with APL or K is compact but capable of concisely solving a shocking range of problems. Most of the functional languages I've played with aren't half as effective, even with a much larger standard library.
- agumonkey 11y agoI dont' know, it feels APL is a brilliant but still 'DSL' compared to FP.
- beagle3 11y agoWhich domain would this DSL be specific to?
- agumonkey 11y agoAs in less general than recursive functions. But I admit it's a very subjective point.
- beagle3 11y agoPersonally, I feel the "recursion is the only way to iterate" purity is practically harmful, even though it is quite elegant for theory. K/J/Q/APL2 and friends[0] have isolated iterative constructs that cover IME 98% of what's needed (each, fold, scan, fixed point, ...) in a way that's just as simple to analyze as recursion[1]. These languages do like DSLish for the first 10 or 20 examples you see - but by the 200th example, it is clear the domain it is specific to is "mostly everything" [0] I'm not considering APL1 as part of the modern family - it had Fortran-style computed gotos for control flow. [1] Although there's about 10 times as many of them, so it's not quite as elegant.