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> I use k3 at work every day. It's perfectly readable to me. Right, but the one follows from the other. I'm passingly familiar with K, Q, and a+. I've worked

> I use k3 at work every day. It's perfectly readable to me. Right, but the one follows from the other. I'm passingly familiar with K, Q, and a+. I've worked with Borror and I kind of own an a+ compiler. I think if you define "readable" to mean "you can learn it with two weeks intensive tuition" the fine, yeah, it's readable. But to me, lightning-fast speed doesn't make up for terse-to-the-point-of-dumb syntax. +/&~&/(!1000)!/:3 5 Reads like a cruel joke to me. It's unreadable and it breaks everything we know about writing good software, and to pretend otherwise kinda comes across as macho BS. Sorry. I don't know why developers in Whitney's programming languages all have this kind of snow-blindness to the clear failings of the language. I don't know why number of characters of code is the thing we're optimising for in 2018. It's not like you're firing bytes over a 56k modem.

kthielen 9y ago
Hi Sam, good to run into you here! :D
goatlover 9y ago
Regex is the similarly terse, and many popular languages make use of it. Do you replace regex syntax with much more verbose function calls? Also, several posts above mention how the interpreter fits inside the CPU L1 cache for maximum performance. I'm guessing the terse syntax helps keep it small enough.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
  > Do you replace regex syntax with much more verbose function calls? No, but I also don't find myself wishing the entire project read like regex does. "If only our entire suite of enterprise software was made up of regexes..."
- kthielen 9y ago
  You know what's faster than having an interpreter for your program that fits entirely in L1 cache? Not having the interpreter at all.
RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
It doesn't seem like there's much I could say to change your mind, but there's no "macho BS" behind my preferences. I wrote quite a bit of Forth before learning K, so maybe my sense of aesthetics had already been drawn a bit outside the mainstream? Some time ago I built an environment for livecoding graphics experiments with K, and the concision of the syntax makes it delightfully easy to experiment and make changes as I build up programs piece by piece. Here's a recording I made which illustrates all the intermediate steps of a simple way to draw a Voronoi diagram: https://i.imgur.com/YZkYyDs.gif https://i.imgur.com/YZkYyDs.gif K notation is a powerful medium of communication when I'm whiteboarding ideas with coworkers, scribbling on a napkin, or tapping an idea into my phone on the subway. I don't write K because I think doing so paints me as some sort of Ubermensch, I write K because I find it crisp and beautiful; An elegant K solution to a thorny problem is poetically satisfying!
Avshalom 9y ago
Wait, you find two weeks to be an unacceptably long time time to learn an entire programming language?

kthielen 9y ago

Hi Sam, good to run into you here! :D

goatlover 9y ago

Regex is the similarly terse, and many popular languages make use of it. Do you replace regex syntax with much more verbose function calls? Also, several posts above mention how the interpreter fits inside the CPU L1 cache for maximum performance. I'm guessing the terse syntax helps keep it small enough.

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
> Do you replace regex syntax with much more verbose function calls? No, but I also don't find myself wishing the entire project read like regex does. "If only our entire suite of enterprise software was made up of regexes..."
kthielen 9y ago
You know what's faster than having an interpreter for your program that fits entirely in L1 cache? Not having the interpreter at all.

RodgerTheGreat 9y ago

It doesn't seem like there's much I could say to change your mind, but there's no "macho BS" behind my preferences. I wrote quite a bit of Forth before learning K, so maybe my sense of aesthetics had already been drawn a bit outside the mainstream? Some time ago I built an environment for livecoding graphics experiments with K, and the concision of the syntax makes it delightfully easy to experiment and make changes as I build up programs piece by piece. Here's a recording I made which illustrates all the intermediate steps of a simple way to draw a Voronoi diagram: https://i.imgur.com/YZkYyDs.gif https://i.imgur.com/YZkYyDs.gif K notation is a powerful medium of communication when I'm whiteboarding ideas with coworkers, scribbling on a napkin, or tapping an idea into my phone on the subway. I don't write K because I think doing so paints me as some sort of Ubermensch, I write K because I find it crisp and beautiful; An elegant K solution to a thorny problem is poetically satisfying!

Avshalom 9y ago

Wait, you find two weeks to be an unacceptably long time time to learn an entire programming language?