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Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t imagine such a language would be well liked by the APL/J/K purists (“You’re missing the point!”), just that it could bring the school
by evincarofautumn 8y ago
Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t imagine such a language would be well liked by the APL/J/K purists (“You’re missing the point!”), just that it could bring the school of thought to the masses—and maybe as a side effect, encourage people to check out the “real deal”. More of a marketing decision than a technical one.
You wouldn’t necessarily have to use explicit dataflow combinators in a wordy array language, but if you did, you might as well go all-in on function-level programming and do a concatenative language. And yeah, I’m working on a Kitten, a CPL with static types—apart from the paradigm and some similar standard APIs, it doesn’t actually have a whole lot in common with Factor; the feel I’m going for is more like postfix OCaml/Rust, whereas Factor is pretty Lispy/Smalltalky.
- kd0amg 8y agoI don’t imagine such a language would be well liked by the APL/J/K purists (“You’re missing the point!”) Meh. I'm not interested in code golf. I find it mostly disappointing that discussions of APL and its descendants rarely include anything of substance about the array programming model. Everyone argues about whether the constant-factor size change from glyphs/words is worth it, but what I actually find interesting is the flexible code reuse you get from having every function automatically work on arbitrarily large data.
- evincarofautumn 8y agoExactly, I think the semantics & interactive mode of programming have a lot of value, and it’s a shame they seem to get less attention than they deserve just because the notation is inscrutable to newcomers.