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With modern day IDEs, auto suggestions would likely lead most developers to easily discovering the exact syntax for "product". Additionally, words that describ

With modern day IDEs, auto suggestions would likely lead most developers to easily discovering the exact syntax for "product". Additionally, words that describe the inherent function makes reading the source A THOUSAND TIMES easier. If A new developer sees the word max/min/sum, they can almost assuredly guess the meaning versus a random pictograph. And even after learning that ‰ means reduce (for example), it's just one more thing that I have to remember.

dzaima 5y ago
in APL you have ~80 of such "pictographs" (and many you'd already know from regular maths). Sure, it's something you have to remember, but not much, really. Words can definitely help new english-speaking devs understand code, but, after getting used to the symbols, they just provide so much flexibility.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  In practice, how do you type the pictographs when coding?
  - razetime 5y ago
    In general programming I like to use a keyboard layout which allows typing APL glyphs with Right Alt: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Depends on the editor. https://tryapl.org https://tryapl.org Hover over the characters at the top to get a sample of a couple ways it might be done.
rak1507 5y ago
> With modern day IDEs, auto suggestions would likely lead most developers to easily discovering the exact syntax for "product". Sure. I don't doubt this. However, if your language is good enough, it's unnecessary. I don't want to rely on an IDE for something as straightforward as taking the product of a list of numbers. > words that describe the inherent function makes reading the source A THOUSAND TIMES easier If your functionality is complicated, this is probably true! No one's saying not to use descriptive function names in APL. You absolutely can (and probably should) for things used multiple times more complicated than a couple of symbols. However, in general I don't think this is true. Have you tried? With regards to guessing the meaning, you do have a good point. If you show someone some APL, and they've never seen it before, it will most likely be completely unreadable, unless they've defined some sort of custom DSL. It doesn't mean they can't pick it up though. Comparing q and APL again, if I see the word 'raze' in q, without knowing what that is already (looking at docs etc) it's basically impossible to guess. In APL, that would be ,/ instantly readable as 'reduce by concatenation'. > it's just one more thing that I have to remember Yes, you'll have to remember the symbol for reduce. But you won't have to remember the word for sum, product, any, all, raze, max, min... Seems worth it to me!
- dzaima 5y ago
  To note is that, while it's easy to remember the word for sum/product/any/all/raze/max/min, you have to know that there's a word for it in the first place. In contrast, in APL, once you know about reduce, there's just one way any of those could be written, and it's obvious. And after you learn about scan (cumulative reduction), you also know the cumulative version for all of those!
yiyus 5y ago
> words that describe the inherent function makes reading the source A THOUSAND TIMES easier I disagree. Using add instead of +, for example, does not make code more readable at all, on the contrary.

dzaima 5y ago

in APL you have ~80 of such "pictographs" (and many you'd already know from regular maths). Sure, it's something you have to remember, but not much, really. Words can definitely help new english-speaking devs understand code, but, after getting used to the symbols, they just provide so much flexibility.

nuclearnice1 5y ago
In practice, how do you type the pictographs when coding?
- razetime 5y ago
  In general programming I like to use a keyboard layout which allows typing APL glyphs with Right Alt: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Depends on the editor. https://tryapl.org https://tryapl.org Hover over the characters at the top to get a sample of a couple ways it might be done.

rak1507 5y ago

> With modern day IDEs, auto suggestions would likely lead most developers to easily discovering the exact syntax for "product". Sure. I don't doubt this. However, if your language is good enough, it's unnecessary. I don't want to rely on an IDE for something as straightforward as taking the product of a list of numbers. > words that describe the inherent function makes reading the source A THOUSAND TIMES easier If your functionality is complicated, this is probably true! No one's saying not to use descriptive function names in APL. You absolutely can (and probably should) for things used multiple times more complicated than a couple of symbols. However, in general I don't think this is true. Have you tried? With regards to guessing the meaning, you do have a good point. If you show someone some APL, and they've never seen it before, it will most likely be completely unreadable, unless they've defined some sort of custom DSL. It doesn't mean they can't pick it up though. Comparing q and APL again, if I see the word 'raze' in q, without knowing what that is already (looking at docs etc) it's basically impossible to guess. In APL, that would be ,/ instantly readable as 'reduce by concatenation'. > it's just one more thing that I have to remember Yes, you'll have to remember the symbol for reduce. But you won't have to remember the word for sum, product, any, all, raze, max, min... Seems worth it to me!

dzaima 5y ago
To note is that, while it's easy to remember the word for sum/product/any/all/raze/max/min, you have to know that there's a word for it in the first place. In contrast, in APL, once you know about reduce, there's just one way any of those could be written, and it's obvious. And after you learn about scan (cumulative reduction), you also know the cumulative version for all of those!

yiyus 5y ago

> words that describe the inherent function makes reading the source A THOUSAND TIMES easier I disagree. Using add instead of +, for example, does not make code more readable at all, on the contrary.