5 ms·

A lot of people seem to have trouble with symbol-based languages, for eg. regular expressions, some parts of Perl, or APL in this case. That seems to be part of

A lot of people seem to have trouble with symbol-based languages, for eg. regular expressions, some parts of Perl, or APL in this case. That seems to be part of the appeal of Python too, for a lot of people, that it's unusually low on non-alphanumeric symbols. I wonder if it has something to do with "Head-voice vs. quiet-mind" [1]. I'm generally on the non-verbal quiet-mind side, and find APL-like languages very intuitive and appealing. Debugging or maintaining them doesn't feel any more difficult than more verbal languages either. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210207121250/http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8558 http://web.archive.org/web/20210207121250/http://esr.ibiblio...

jacoblambda 5y ago
I think that quiet vs verbal mind personality difference is really what separates whether people like which languages. I personally can't stand languages that are "spoken description". I understand the appeal to others but the languages just don't mesh with my way of thought. When I'm programming or building a system I'm thinking in the sense of abstract transformations and structures not in any spoken structure. Often times for me it's easier to draw out what I'm thinking of rather than explain it since there's not necessarily a verbal representation behind what I'm thinking of until I sit down and try to come up with one.
Syzygies 5y ago
There was study of Harvard undergraduates that demonstrated Greek letters made math harder. I tell my students that Columbia undergraduates are of course smarter, but still...
xelxebar 5y ago
Interesting. I was under the impression that Iversion intended APL to also read almost like English, provided you knew the names of operators and idioms. Aaron Hsu has some talks showing this off about his co-dfns compiler.

5 ms·

A lot of people seem to have trouble with symbol-based languages, for eg. regular expressions, some parts of Perl, or APL in this case. That seems to be part of

by sundarurfriend 5y ago

jacoblambda 5y ago
I think that quiet vs verbal mind personality difference is really what separates whether people like which languages. I personally can't stand languages that are "spoken description". I understand the appeal to others but the languages just don't mesh with my way of thought. When I'm programming or building a system I'm thinking in the sense of abstract transformations and structures not in any spoken structure. Often times for me it's easier to draw out what I'm thinking of rather than explain it since there's not necessarily a verbal representation behind what I'm thinking of until I sit down and try to come up with one.
Syzygies 5y ago
There was study of Harvard undergraduates that demonstrated Greek letters made math harder. I tell my students that Columbia undergraduates are of course smarter, but still...
xelxebar 5y ago
Interesting. I was under the impression that Iversion intended APL to also read almost like English, provided you knew the names of operators and idioms. Aaron Hsu has some talks showing this off about his co-dfns compiler.