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This particular way of coding to me exemplifies one very important problem with people who work in technical professions: their utter inability to "read the roo

This particular way of coding to me exemplifies one very important problem with people who work in technical professions: their utter inability to "read the room". In this specific instance, I suspect the folks who enjoy writing (and assuming they actually can - reading) code like this, completely assume that everyone has a brain with the same kind of weird quirks theirs has, namely the ability to recall almost instantly infernally long minutiae of details and thereby decipher what most people perceive as pure noise. Or, more generally speaking, they assume that their potential audience essentially are as smart as they are. News at 11: this is almost never the case. And in the case of: this type of language, APL, LISP, functional programming, quantum physics, etc ... your favorite topic/programming language/hobby ends up bound to be confined to a tiny bubble of folks that are like you instead of gaining popularity.

avmich 4y ago
It's interesting that in the days APL was rather popular with non-programmers.
gitonthescene 4y ago
If you haven’t yet, you should check out posts by geocar referred to elsewhere in these comments. Odds are you are selling yourself short if you think the difference is smarts.
kragen 4y ago
If you don't understand the code, probably you don't know what kinds of mental processes are needed to understand it. Maybe "recalling almost instantly infernally long minutiae of details" isn't actually among them. Maybe great intelligence isn't, either. There's a whole genre on YouTube of videos of people doing day-to-day work with skills that seem utterly superhuman, with names like "Fast Workers #230" and "People are AWESOME 2020", like https://youtu.be/YmkPoiEcgJM https://youtu.be/YmkPoiEcgJM. Actually, though, if you practice almost any skill every day for an hour or more, working diligently to improve, after 20–40 years your ability at it will seem superhuman, even if you're average intelligence or slightly below. (Unless it's a professional sport, in which case people will be mentally comparing you to Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods, and you won't get that good. Or a popular hobby like knitting.) It definitely does not require 20–40 years of effort to understand quantum physics or code written in K. — ⁂ — Now, suppose that it were true that reading poetry written in Volapuk (or whatever) were a niche interest because of some essential feature of Volapuk that inherently limits it to a small group, rather than because learning Volapuk takes time that most people haven't put in, for the standard diffusion-of-innovations reasons. Would that be bad? Would it mean that people writing poetry in Volapuk had an "utter inability to 'read the room'"? I don't think so—to attribute their choice to do so to such a cognitive handicap, you are presupposing that you understand their motivations, and that those motivations include maximizing the popularity of their creation. But it should be obvious upon a moment's thought that plenty of poetry, and code, is written with no thought for participating in such popularity contests; it's written for an audience of one, or two, or forty-eight. Perhaps the majority of poetry and code. So writing it in Volapuk, or K, may actually be a rational strategy if it appeals to your intended audience—not an error resulting from a mental disability, as you claim. More generally, quoting Chip Salzenberg: > It's usually a big mistake to assume that a number of experts on a given subject disagree with you because they don't grasp the true situation. (cf. http://canonical.org/~kragen/quotes.txt http://canonical.org/~kragen/quotes.txt)
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > If you don't understand the code, probably you don't know what kinds of mental processes are needed to understand it. Probably, but then: I spent close to a year of my life writing "software" in APL. I hated every second of it, especially the part where I'd need to zoom to the bathroom and come back 5 mn later not being able to understand how the last line of code I wrote worked. I can't even imagine what it would take today, or to the poor soul who inherited the code. The code I've looked at here reminds me exactly of that time. Boy would I never go back to doing stuff like this.
  - kragen 4y ago
    There certainly are a lot of people who used APL at one time and then stopped. One of Richard Stallman's first software projects back in the 01960s was a text editor written in APL. Is it possible the software you were working on was shitty in a way that wasn't essential to APL?

avmich 4y ago

It's interesting that in the days APL was rather popular with non-programmers.

gitonthescene 4y ago

If you haven’t yet, you should check out posts by geocar referred to elsewhere in these comments. Odds are you are selling yourself short if you think the difference is smarts.

kragen 4y ago

If you don't understand the code, probably you don't know what kinds of mental processes are needed to understand it. Maybe "recalling almost instantly infernally long minutiae of details" isn't actually among them. Maybe great intelligence isn't, either. There's a whole genre on YouTube of videos of people doing day-to-day work with skills that seem utterly superhuman, with names like "Fast Workers #230" and "People are AWESOME 2020", like https://youtu.be/YmkPoiEcgJM https://youtu.be/YmkPoiEcgJM. Actually, though, if you practice almost any skill every day for an hour or more, working diligently to improve, after 20–40 years your ability at it will seem superhuman, even if you're average intelligence or slightly below. (Unless it's a professional sport, in which case people will be mentally comparing you to Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods, and you won't get that good. Or a popular hobby like knitting.) It definitely does not require 20–40 years of effort to understand quantum physics or code written in K. — ⁂ — Now, suppose that it were true that reading poetry written in Volapuk (or whatever) were a niche interest because of some essential feature of Volapuk that inherently limits it to a small group, rather than because learning Volapuk takes time that most people haven't put in, for the standard diffusion-of-innovations reasons. Would that be bad? Would it mean that people writing poetry in Volapuk had an "utter inability to 'read the room'"? I don't think so—to attribute their choice to do so to such a cognitive handicap, you are presupposing that you understand their motivations, and that those motivations include maximizing the popularity of their creation. But it should be obvious upon a moment's thought that plenty of poetry, and code, is written with no thought for participating in such popularity contests; it's written for an audience of one, or two, or forty-eight. Perhaps the majority of poetry and code. So writing it in Volapuk, or K, may actually be a rational strategy if it appeals to your intended audience—not an error resulting from a mental disability, as you claim. More generally, quoting Chip Salzenberg: > It's usually a big mistake to assume that a number of experts on a given subject disagree with you because they don't grasp the true situation. (cf. http://canonical.org/~kragen/quotes.txt http://canonical.org/~kragen/quotes.txt)

ur-whale 4y ago
> If you don't understand the code, probably you don't know what kinds of mental processes are needed to understand it. Probably, but then: I spent close to a year of my life writing "software" in APL. I hated every second of it, especially the part where I'd need to zoom to the bathroom and come back 5 mn later not being able to understand how the last line of code I wrote worked. I can't even imagine what it would take today, or to the poor soul who inherited the code. The code I've looked at here reminds me exactly of that time. Boy would I never go back to doing stuff like this.
- kragen 4y ago
  There certainly are a lot of people who used APL at one time and then stopped. One of Richard Stallman's first software projects back in the 01960s was a text editor written in APL. Is it possible the software you were working on was shitty in a way that wasn't essential to APL?