3 ms·

Terseness and composability. Here: https://medium.com/@jansson.sebastian/apl-in-the-eyes-of-a-python-programmer-7b1b955f7134 https://medium.com/@jansson.sebast

• bombcar 5y ago
  It's interesting how many programming languages seem to have "accessible to those not trained in it" as a design goal (offhand I can think of SQL and COBOL, but also BASIC and you see it even in Python, etc). But there are trade-offs doing that, and "amount you can look at at once" is a huge one.
  • busterarm 5y ago
    "amount you can look at at once" is severely underestimated.
  • yiyus 5y ago
    This. What I find really annoying is how many people confuse this property ("accessible to those not trained in it") with readability.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      It's a shame, too, as the most "dense" recent language we had was perl and that got universally made fun of as "line noise" - which I feel influences people more than they think.
      • b2gills 5y ago
        I also wonder how many people understand that linenoise meant noise on a data cable of some description. i.e. the difference between `d` and `$` is a single bit. If your cable happened to glitch during that first `1` bit, you would get a `$` instead of the `d` you should have. The thing is that doesn't happen anymore. Or at least when it does happen it gets caught and retransmitted. --- Which means that some of the first people to say it might not have been making a value judgement, but a statement of fact. (I doubt there was very many in that camp.) Note that I say that as a person who's second favorite language is Perl. (First favorite is Raku, formally known as Perl6.) It is too bad that most of coolest features have come to Perl after I switched to Raku.