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One thing that I've always noticed about this video is how much it makes sense when explained iteratively at each step. The final product, though, I can't pictu
by dimator 7y ago
One thing that I've always noticed about this video is how much it makes sense when explained iteratively at each step. The final product, though, I can't picture that checked into source control for someone to understand weeks or months after it was thought through and written. Unpacking the final form seems almost impossible.
I'd love to know the software engineering side of using APL. For the same reasons that using esoteric bashisms instead of say a clearer python script is bad form, I can't picture APL fitting into good engineering practice. Maybe once you think in APL, it all works out fine.
- kick 7y agoAPL is readable more or less like you'd read English, so it's not hard to decipher. You can find a lot of talks on the normal video-sharing sites from people like Aaron Hsu and Roger Hui demonstrating this. The modern Dyalog style of writing it is (in my opinion) a bit harder to decipher than other ways, though (at least, the style used in their public code repositories); it's much too long, and looks more or less like BASIC with symbols nowadays. When you internalize the parsing model, it's downright trivial to read pretty much anything in it or its dialects.
- clarry 7y ago> You can find a lot of talks on the normal video-sharing sites from people like Aaron Hsu and Roger Hui demonstrating this. If you have a good one in mind, please do recommend! Last night I watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKfJRyoiBlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKfJRyoiBlY (found via r/apljk, posted by Kari himself IIRC) This one uses pretty simple constructs though, mostly ones I'm already familiar with. It (intentionally) avoided reading the more complicated expressions. (Also if there's another active online community around APL & similar langauges, I'd like to know about it)
- apricot 7y agoAPL was designed to be executable math notation. I think of APL programs as math formulas. You don't expect to read an unfamiliar formula and immediately understand it. You decipher it, little by little, until it clicks and you understand what it means.