3 ms·

I'm very much a believer in concise notation (more than most people I've worked with), but the advantages of having a name that can be unambiguously spoken are

by kick 7y ago

I'm very much a believer in concise notation (more than most people I've worked with), but the advantages of having a name that can be unambiguously spoken are large enough to outweigh a small constant factor. I don't believe this holds up to scrutiny. APL as a language was made to be spoken, and it seems to have succeeded in that. Alan Perlis briefly touched on that in a great paper,[1] and just about everyone who's worked with the language and its derivatives agrees that your statement isn't true. The idea that APL and its derivatives can't be "read and talked about" is frankly ignoring reality by any stretch of the imagination. For example, here's [2] [3] [4] some videos disproving your statement, the first two being APL, the last being k itself. For extra bonus points, see Aaron Hsu's talks [5]; pick any of them, they're all pretty good, and most have a segment in them explaining how that viewpoint is wrong. [1] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrOg19gzP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrOg19gzP4 [5] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aaron+hsu https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aaron+hsu

lmm 7y ago
> I don't believe this holds up to scrutiny. APL as a language was made to be spoken, and it seems to have succeeded in that. Alan Perlis briefly touched on that in a great paper,[1] and just about everyone who's worked with the language and its derivatives agrees that your statement isn't true. The people who have worked with the language are a small and highly specialised minority of programmers, unusual in many respects. I haven't worked with APL, but I have worked with symbol-heavy Haskell-style code, and I've found that even if these operators theoretically had standardised, pronounceable names, in practice being able to talk about them was a genuine problem. If there's some special difference between APL and symbolic Haskell libraries, what is that difference?
- kick 7y ago
  Alan Perlis is a Turing Award-winner who helped to standardize the most influential language of all time, ALGOL, of which Go, Python, C and most languages originate. In many respects, he was closer to a Go programmer than a Haskell programmer. Haskell's symbols aren't notation, they're just scribbles. Miranda is a better comparison, but Miranda too doesn't lean hard enough. Ken Iverson literally developed APL as a way to give better lectures at Harvard. It was a verbal and handwritten language long before it was typed. It excels at it, because it was designed for it.

by kick 7y ago

lmm 7y ago

> I don't believe this holds up to scrutiny. APL as a language was made to be spoken, and it seems to have succeeded in that. Alan Perlis briefly touched on that in a great paper,[1] and just about everyone who's worked with the language and its derivatives agrees that your statement isn't true. The people who have worked with the language are a small and highly specialised minority of programmers, unusual in many respects. I haven't worked with APL, but I have worked with symbol-heavy Haskell-style code, and I've found that even if these operators theoretically had standardised, pronounceable names, in practice being able to talk about them was a genuine problem. If there's some special difference between APL and symbolic Haskell libraries, what is that difference?

kick 7y ago
Alan Perlis is a Turing Award-winner who helped to standardize the most influential language of all time, ALGOL, of which Go, Python, C and most languages originate. In many respects, he was closer to a Go programmer than a Haskell programmer. Haskell's symbols aren't notation, they're just scribbles. Miranda is a better comparison, but Miranda too doesn't lean hard enough. Ken Iverson literally developed APL as a way to give better lectures at Harvard. It was a verbal and handwritten language long before it was typed. It excels at it, because it was designed for it.