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> but without all the squiggly characters I so liked the APL squiggly characters (mostly Greek letter based glyphs). Made for very succinct code. Combined with
by no-s 5y ago
> but without all the squiggly characters
I so liked the APL squiggly characters (mostly Greek letter based glyphs). Made for very succinct code. Combined with right-to-left precedence resulted in very low overhead to write and read code. Most people who complained about it APL as “write-only” seemed to be outside the community of serious APL programmers. Once you learned to read the language it was very easy to comprehend at regular reading speed...
In contrast NumPy seems absurdly wordy, and waiting for the completion menu in an IDE tends to derail my train of thought.
However I do tend to like NumPy for being APL-like, so it’s not a damning contrast as far as getting things done.
- gmfawcett 5y agoI get it, and I wrote that even though I'm a fairly big J enthusiast. It's fun to solve a tricky problem by cranking out two or three rows of line noise. :) Numpy is wordy, but you can still program in terms of arrays -- it might not feel like quick symbolic magic, but the underlying paradigm is (almost) the same.
- agumonkey 5y agoI really don't understand why people dislike this. As long as the domain and input/ouputs are clear.. having a Δ is not worse than a `delta` or `computeDeltaOfPair` (actually the shorter the better to me..
- gmfawcett 5y agoin fairness, a delta is far more discoverable to a casual reader than, say the APL Grade Up symbol. :)
- 7thaccount 5y agoBut once you use grade up, it's easy to remember. I used it like a year ago when playing with APL and haven't touched it since then and still remember the symbol.