3 ms·

While I'm not going to go collect a bunch of APL programmers to confirm this (where would one even find them?), I highly doubt that claim. Knowing a language do

While I'm not going to go collect a bunch of APL programmers to confirm this (where would one even find them?), I highly doubt that claim. Knowing a language doesn't mean dense code is suddenly obvious. This is a silly example, but years ago I wanted to prove that you could write a non-trivial program in python using a single expression (because python's lambda only allows you to use expressions, not statements). And I managed to do that. And it's hideous. Any python programmer could theoretically understand what this is doing, but I doubt they would. Bonus points if you can guess what it does without running it! (lambda: not globals().__setitem__('sys', __import__('sys')) and not globals().__setitem__('this', sys.modules[globals()['__name__']]) and not globals().__setitem__('time', __import__('time')) and #program [setattr(this, k, v) for k,v in { 'set_color': (lambda c: w(['*', ' '][c])), 'abs': (lambda t: (int(t) + (int(t) >> 31)) ^ (int(t) >> 31)), 'w': lambda x: sys.stdout.write(x) == 0, 'smash': (lambda t: -((t * -1) >> 31)), 'color': (lambda n,k: set_color(smash (k & (n - k)))), 'col': (lambda n, k: k <= n and not color(n,k) and col(n,k + 1)), 'row': (lambda n: ( not w(' ' * (40-abs(int(n/2)))) and (col(abs(n), 0) or True) and not w("\n") and (abs(n) < 63 or n < 0) and not time.sleep(0.05) and row(n+1))), 'triangle': lambda: row(-60) }.items() ] and triangle() )()

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
That example isn't like APL though because of it's verbosity. Also APL has more universal abstractions to express a lot of this kind of logic. That lack of verbosity makes it easier to pick out the intention revealing code, which isn't the case here.
- overgard 4y ago
  Well, of course that code was meant as a joke, and I did some things intentionally weird. I mention it just to point out that a metric like "it's only a single expression!" doesn't mean that something is actually simple.
rak1507 4y ago
You don't need a bunch - you need 1. I am an APL programmer, and I can tell you 100% for certain that anyone who knows any APL would find that easy to read. (Want to find more though? Go to one of these: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums) Knowing a language absolutely does mean 'dense' code is obvious (fwiw that APL code is not at all dense, you can do go a lot shorter). It's comparable to chinese characters or something like that. It only looks dense/unreadable to someone who doesn't know it.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

That example isn't like APL though because of it's verbosity. Also APL has more universal abstractions to express a lot of this kind of logic. That lack of verbosity makes it easier to pick out the intention revealing code, which isn't the case here.

overgard 4y ago
Well, of course that code was meant as a joke, and I did some things intentionally weird. I mention it just to point out that a metric like "it's only a single expression!" doesn't mean that something is actually simple.

rak1507 4y ago

You don't need a bunch - you need 1. I am an APL programmer, and I can tell you 100% for certain that anyone who knows any APL would find that easy to read. (Want to find more though? Go to one of these: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums) Knowing a language absolutely does mean 'dense' code is obvious (fwiw that APL code is not at all dense, you can do go a lot shorter). It's comparable to chinese characters or something like that. It only looks dense/unreadable to someone who doesn't know it.