4 ms·

> Here's a video that really illustrates the power of this paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 Am

by Cactus2018 6y ago

> Here's a video that really illustrates the power of this paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 Amazing game of life code!

Verdex 6y ago
The first time I watched the video my response was that he was literally doing magic or that it was some sort of joke. Over time the video has become more approachable and I have a pretty good idea of what is going on. However, if I was asked to approach game of life in APL myself then I think I would still be pretty lost.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  A Sudoku Solver in APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
- dTal 6y ago
  It's a kind of sleight of hand. It purports to be showing off the power of APL; what it's really showing off is the cleverness of someone who realized that the rules of Life could be expressed as a series of array operations. APL has a kind of mystique, but all it really is is a bunch of NumPy functions with a quirky DSL (of course, APL came first and heavily inspired NumPy). But we've quietly been doing the APL experiment in the background, by pressuring programmers to avoid pure Python in favor of NumPy functions for speed, and the results are in - you can indeed push the array paradigm very far. But not quite far enough to be general and efficient. The jury is still out on whether the quirky DSL is worth anything. My suspicion is that having names for array operators is very valuable indeed, but dedicated symbols for them much less so, and cryptic ASCII digraphs are barking completely up the wrong tree. But if you really want the weird syntax - well, it's not exactly a difficult language to parse, and Unicode is a thing now. If the notation is worthwhile, there's no real reason why any language couldn't have APL built-in as a DSL, just like regex.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Rank polymorphism is genuinely important and useful and a lot of languages are missing it. Cryptic symbols, I agree, less so. If your language doesn't arbitrarily restrict identifiers then you can just define the APL operators as functions and write code that looks like APL - I tried doing this in Scala once, and it worked ok. But it's hard enough to convince people to take the time to learn what "map" or "filter" or "<* " does, never mind anything further in that direction.
  - leprechaun1066 6y ago
    Lisp has April, which I thought was pretty cool. https://github.com/phantomics/april https://github.com/phantomics/april

> Here's a video that really illustrates the power of this paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 Amazing game of life code!

Verdex 6y ago

The first time I watched the video my response was that he was literally doing magic or that it was some sort of joke. Over time the video has become more approachable and I have a pretty good idea of what is going on. However, if I was asked to approach game of life in APL myself then I think I would still be pretty lost.

Cactus2018 6y ago
A Sudoku Solver in APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
dTal 6y ago
It's a kind of sleight of hand. It purports to be showing off the power of APL; what it's really showing off is the cleverness of someone who realized that the rules of Life could be expressed as a series of array operations. APL has a kind of mystique, but all it really is is a bunch of NumPy functions with a quirky DSL (of course, APL came first and heavily inspired NumPy). But we've quietly been doing the APL experiment in the background, by pressuring programmers to avoid pure Python in favor of NumPy functions for speed, and the results are in - you can indeed push the array paradigm very far. But not quite far enough to be general and efficient. The jury is still out on whether the quirky DSL is worth anything. My suspicion is that having names for array operators is very valuable indeed, but dedicated symbols for them much less so, and cryptic ASCII digraphs are barking completely up the wrong tree. But if you really want the weird syntax - well, it's not exactly a difficult language to parse, and Unicode is a thing now. If the notation is worthwhile, there's no real reason why any language couldn't have APL built-in as a DSL, just like regex.
- lmm 6y ago
  Rank polymorphism is genuinely important and useful and a lot of languages are missing it. Cryptic symbols, I agree, less so. If your language doesn't arbitrarily restrict identifiers then you can just define the APL operators as functions and write code that looks like APL - I tried doing this in Scala once, and it worked ok. But it's hard enough to convince people to take the time to learn what "map" or "filter" or "<* " does, never mind anything further in that direction.
- leprechaun1066 6y ago
  Lisp has April, which I thought was pretty cool. https://github.com/phantomics/april https://github.com/phantomics/april