3 ms·

> The reason I'm asking about further problems is not because I want to "move the goalposts" but because I (and likely other people) are skeptical about the abi

by clarry 6y ago

> The reason I'm asking about further problems is not because I want to "move the goalposts" but because I (and likely other people) are skeptical about the ability of K (and other APL family languages) scale beyond simple problems or specific niches (such as finance). Yeah and I've become wary of languages that are an island where everything is nice as long as you can change the problem until it has a nice solution in the language. Forth is a bit like that. The risk is that all these nice and elegant things fall apart like a house of cards once you try to merge the island with the ugly nasty real world, where legacy compatibility and rigid requirements from various stakeholders define the problem. I think most people out there are primarily interested in general purpose languages that they can learn, master, and use to attack just about every problem, ugly or not. In that case, it's only natural to be reserved about proposals that are sold as very elegant but the demonstrations of which are quite removed from the ugly real world problems. I'm kind of on the edge. I can tell that a bunch of cool stuff has been done in APL and derivatives, but I'm still not sure whether it'd hold up e.g. in my day-to-day job (which involves lots of networking, async i/o, timers & callbacks, parsing, message passing, crypto, etc). And I still feel like there aren't enough relevant real world examples (or I'm just not able to find them much).

beagle3 6y ago
> The risk is that all these nice and elegant things fall apart like a house of cards once you try to merge the island with the ugly nasty real world, where legacy compatibility and rigid requirements from various stakeholders define the problem. I've had more of that experience with Java than with K in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Java wasn't new, and was well accepted, but the ecosystem was horrible and interfacing to other systems required great effort and was abysmal in general. The issue you are talking about is not a language issue, it's an ecosystem issue. K recognizes it by not trying to be all things to all people - it's incredibly easy to FFI directly, and to connect through various interprocess methods (including a native efficient KIPC well supported from just about every other language environment). Arthur also dropped native GUI in 2005, even though it was incredibly effective (by far the easiest way to get a GUI - way easier than VB6 for example; http://nsl.com http://nsl.com has a spreadsheet, calculator, and more showing just how easy). It was incredibly effective, but also incredibly unattractive (the term "milspec" was often used by users). This the issue you mention - users wanted beautiful GUIs, often web ones, that they could put their own touch to. The requirements are rigid and have inherent complexity that general elegance cannot help with. K is decoupled enough to not have to solve everything to be extremely useful. I don't know if it's still the case, but in 2004, if you called Kx systems (the people who sell K) and asked for an evaluation, they would send a person who would solve YOUR problems with K on YOUR system, working 1-2 weeks. Then you got 1-2 weeks of evaluation; and then they charged tens of thousands of $$$ for the solution if you wanted to keep using it. And many did. Most project specs today include requirements that are accidental complexity, rather than inherent. K/APL (and their philosophy) is about solving the inherent complexity elegantly. It's often possible, but rarely practiced, that you can solve the inherent complexity one way, and the accidental complexity another way, and it ends up being much simpler overall.
- clarry 6y ago
  > The issue you are talking about is not a language issue, it's an ecosystem issue. K recognizes it by not trying to be all things to all people - it's incredibly easy to FFI directly, and to connect through various interprocess methods (including a native efficient KIPC well supported from just about every other language environment). I'm afraid this only makes my point stronger. If I'm pushing the ugly complexity outside of K with an FFI, I'll be stuck writing the ugly plumbing (a major part of the job) in some other language. For the uninitiated it is very difficult to say whether or how much will be left for K to handle, if anything. That kind of thing would make K look like a one-trick pony, and maybe not worth investing in. > Most project specs today include requirements that are accidental complexity, rather than inherent. I agree, and I'm afraid that in many projects (including my dayjob) the accidental complexity is the bigger job. Even if I could solve the inherent complexity of all we do in one beautiful line of code, we're still stuck with a mountain of crap from 2-3 decades of legacy and bad design that really can't be changed.
  - iateanapple 6y ago
    > If I'm pushing the ugly complexity outside of K with an FFI, I'll be stuck writing the ugly plumbing (a major part of the job) in some other language. It’s kind of the opposite - you get an easy to use escape hatch where it makes sense - which enables you to work with large complex legacy systems. It lets you do the ugly plumbing in K. Contrast this with Java - back in the early 2000s my company ended up rewriting huge parts of our legacy systems to Java simply because JNI was so bad.

by clarry 6y ago

beagle3 6y ago

> The risk is that all these nice and elegant things fall apart like a house of cards once you try to merge the island with the ugly nasty real world, where legacy compatibility and rigid requirements from various stakeholders define the problem. I've had more of that experience with Java than with K in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Java wasn't new, and was well accepted, but the ecosystem was horrible and interfacing to other systems required great effort and was abysmal in general. The issue you are talking about is not a language issue, it's an ecosystem issue. K recognizes it by not trying to be all things to all people - it's incredibly easy to FFI directly, and to connect through various interprocess methods (including a native efficient KIPC well supported from just about every other language environment). Arthur also dropped native GUI in 2005, even though it was incredibly effective (by far the easiest way to get a GUI - way easier than VB6 for example; http://nsl.com http://nsl.com has a spreadsheet, calculator, and more showing just how easy). It was incredibly effective, but also incredibly unattractive (the term "milspec" was often used by users). This the issue you mention - users wanted beautiful GUIs, often web ones, that they could put their own touch to. The requirements are rigid and have inherent complexity that general elegance cannot help with. K is decoupled enough to not have to solve everything to be extremely useful. I don't know if it's still the case, but in 2004, if you called Kx systems (the people who sell K) and asked for an evaluation, they would send a person who would solve YOUR problems with K on YOUR system, working 1-2 weeks. Then you got 1-2 weeks of evaluation; and then they charged tens of thousands of $$$ for the solution if you wanted to keep using it. And many did. Most project specs today include requirements that are accidental complexity, rather than inherent. K/APL (and their philosophy) is about solving the inherent complexity elegantly. It's often possible, but rarely practiced, that you can solve the inherent complexity one way, and the accidental complexity another way, and it ends up being much simpler overall.

clarry 6y ago
> The issue you are talking about is not a language issue, it's an ecosystem issue. K recognizes it by not trying to be all things to all people - it's incredibly easy to FFI directly, and to connect through various interprocess methods (including a native efficient KIPC well supported from just about every other language environment). I'm afraid this only makes my point stronger. If I'm pushing the ugly complexity outside of K with an FFI, I'll be stuck writing the ugly plumbing (a major part of the job) in some other language. For the uninitiated it is very difficult to say whether or how much will be left for K to handle, if anything. That kind of thing would make K look like a one-trick pony, and maybe not worth investing in. > Most project specs today include requirements that are accidental complexity, rather than inherent. I agree, and I'm afraid that in many projects (including my dayjob) the accidental complexity is the bigger job. Even if I could solve the inherent complexity of all we do in one beautiful line of code, we're still stuck with a mountain of crap from 2-3 decades of legacy and bad design that really can't be changed.
- iateanapple 6y ago
  > If I'm pushing the ugly complexity outside of K with an FFI, I'll be stuck writing the ugly plumbing (a major part of the job) in some other language. It’s kind of the opposite - you get an easy to use escape hatch where it makes sense - which enables you to work with large complex legacy systems. It lets you do the ugly plumbing in K. Contrast this with Java - back in the early 2000s my company ended up rewriting huge parts of our legacy systems to Java simply because JNI was so bad.