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Take a break from K (or any other shorthand language of your choosing) for a year or five, then come back and try to figure out what the code you wrote when you

Take a break from K (or any other shorthand language of your choosing) for a year or five, then come back and try to figure out what the code you wrote when you were using it frequently is actually doing. Now do the same with well-written, verbose C-style or Python code (no shorthand/abbreviations, no lambdas, no ternary notation, etc.). Shorthand code in any language is bad in the long run because it's unmaintainable except by people who work with it on a regular basis. You are making the same arguments as Perl fanatics who used every possible abbreviation in their language 25 years ago. How much of that is even comprehensible now without a major reverse-engineering effort?

geocar 7y ago
> You are making the same arguments as Perl fanatics who used every possible abbreviation in their language 25 years ago. How much of that is even comprehensible now without a major reverse-engineering effort? Perl is inscrutable in a different way: It is impossible to insert an instruction reliably into a statement allows the student to observe what is going on without changing it: Program flow can change mid-sentence. This isn't true of K. > Take a break from K (or any other shorthand language of your choosing) for a year or five, then come back and try to figure out what the code you wrote when you were using it frequently is actually doing. I've been looking at K code for more than five years at this point, and I don't have any problems reading code written by K programmers a decade ago or more. I think you're completely wrong about this.
- qayxc 7y ago
  > I've been looking at K code for more than five years at this point, and I don't have any problems reading code written by K programmers a decade ago or more. I think you're completely missing the point here. The assumption wasn't that old code is unreadable, but that you have trouble understanding it after NOT looking at ANY K code for five years.
  - Firadeoclus 7y ago
    If that's true it's a trade-off which may or may not be worth it. It's not inherently bad or unacceptable. Many other skills require a period of re-learning after a five year gap. Where do you believe K sits on the scale of re-learning effort involved, riding-a-bike seconds to minutes, or months to years of effort? I've only learned a little APL so far, and that really didn't take much effort so I'd be surprised if it would take me more than a month of dedicated learning to get fluent in the language. If that's what it takes to learn from scratch (the language, not the concepts common to maths and many programming languages), I would expect re-learning to be possible in less than a week. That does not strike me as too big an obstacle in many cases.
  - geocar 7y ago
    > I think you're completely missing the point here. The assumption wasn't that old code is unreadable, but that you have trouble understanding it after NOT looking at ANY K code for five years. Fair enough. I don't see any evidence why that would be true, or even more true than other languages. Do you have any?
    - wcarss 7y ago
      I don't have a horse in the race here but guess that a big part would be things like single-character identifiers rather than descriptive names. A slightly weaker but maybe more realistic example, albeit in mathy terms: pick a language L from the set of all programming languages as your next language, according to a probability distribution of commonality of use in 2020 or so, possibly skewed for your field/interests, and work on it exclusively for 5 years. If your initial language (before L) was K, you're not terribly likely to have picked a successor language that has any relation to K. If your initial language was C, your successor is likely ALGOL-like, and you probably won't have rewired your brain totally. So coming back to old work after 5 years will likely be less of a shock. Granted, this is like saying "k is different!", but it ties it to a real-world situation where it could even bother a dedicated k programmer.
      - geocar 7y ago
        I think that's an interesting experiment, but I don't believe it will produce the results you predict: I haven't written in Postscript for over ten years, but I just picked up some random postscript code and have no problem reading it. Why would I expect other programmers to be different in this regard? However even if it's true for most programmers, why does this definition of "readability" have value?
        wcarss 7y ago
        It's a fair point that you have that ability and hope others will too. They might! I don't know that I would, but I might! I'm pretty stupid sometimes though. My other comment on the nearby thread likely best-addresses why I think coming back "cold" is useful, based on an assumption that being a novice and being cold are similar, and maybe they're not. With regard to picking up postscript specifically: I'm not intimately familiar with the language, but the bits I found in a quick search look a) less approachable than javascript to me, so fair point on that, but b) somewhat algol-like. At a glance I felt like I could pick up the flow-of-execution without a lot of work, though I could be wrong. If it is kind of algol-like, I feel like that plays in favour of my argument a bit -- algol-like languages are so ubiquitous as to be hard to really not use the mental model for 5 years, so we're probably not really coming in "cold" to one.

geocar 7y ago

> You are making the same arguments as Perl fanatics who used every possible abbreviation in their language 25 years ago. How much of that is even comprehensible now without a major reverse-engineering effort? Perl is inscrutable in a different way: It is impossible to insert an instruction reliably into a statement allows the student to observe what is going on without changing it: Program flow can change mid-sentence. This isn't true of K. > Take a break from K (or any other shorthand language of your choosing) for a year or five, then come back and try to figure out what the code you wrote when you were using it frequently is actually doing. I've been looking at K code for more than five years at this point, and I don't have any problems reading code written by K programmers a decade ago or more. I think you're completely wrong about this.

qayxc 7y ago
> I've been looking at K code for more than five years at this point, and I don't have any problems reading code written by K programmers a decade ago or more. I think you're completely missing the point here. The assumption wasn't that old code is unreadable, but that you have trouble understanding it after NOT looking at ANY K code for five years.
- Firadeoclus 7y ago
  If that's true it's a trade-off which may or may not be worth it. It's not inherently bad or unacceptable. Many other skills require a period of re-learning after a five year gap. Where do you believe K sits on the scale of re-learning effort involved, riding-a-bike seconds to minutes, or months to years of effort? I've only learned a little APL so far, and that really didn't take much effort so I'd be surprised if it would take me more than a month of dedicated learning to get fluent in the language. If that's what it takes to learn from scratch (the language, not the concepts common to maths and many programming languages), I would expect re-learning to be possible in less than a week. That does not strike me as too big an obstacle in many cases.
- geocar 7y ago
  > I think you're completely missing the point here. The assumption wasn't that old code is unreadable, but that you have trouble understanding it after NOT looking at ANY K code for five years. Fair enough. I don't see any evidence why that would be true, or even more true than other languages. Do you have any?
  - wcarss 7y ago
    I don't have a horse in the race here but guess that a big part would be things like single-character identifiers rather than descriptive names. A slightly weaker but maybe more realistic example, albeit in mathy terms: pick a language L from the set of all programming languages as your next language, according to a probability distribution of commonality of use in 2020 or so, possibly skewed for your field/interests, and work on it exclusively for 5 years. If your initial language (before L) was K, you're not terribly likely to have picked a successor language that has any relation to K. If your initial language was C, your successor is likely ALGOL-like, and you probably won't have rewired your brain totally. So coming back to old work after 5 years will likely be less of a shock. Granted, this is like saying "k is different!", but it ties it to a real-world situation where it could even bother a dedicated k programmer.
    - geocar 7y ago
      I think that's an interesting experiment, but I don't believe it will produce the results you predict: I haven't written in Postscript for over ten years, but I just picked up some random postscript code and have no problem reading it. Why would I expect other programmers to be different in this regard? However even if it's true for most programmers, why does this definition of "readability" have value?
      - wcarss 7y ago
        It's a fair point that you have that ability and hope others will too. They might! I don't know that I would, but I might! I'm pretty stupid sometimes though. My other comment on the nearby thread likely best-addresses why I think coming back "cold" is useful, based on an assumption that being a novice and being cold are similar, and maybe they're not. With regard to picking up postscript specifically: I'm not intimately familiar with the language, but the bits I found in a quick search look a) less approachable than javascript to me, so fair point on that, but b) somewhat algol-like. At a glance I felt like I could pick up the flow-of-execution without a lot of work, though I could be wrong. If it is kind of algol-like, I feel like that plays in favour of my argument a bit -- algol-like languages are so ubiquitous as to be hard to really not use the mental model for 5 years, so we're probably not really coming in "cold" to one.