arcfide

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91.
by arcfide 10y ago
This is the live stream that was talked about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565743 I'll be doing this in a sort of AMA style. Please ask your technical questions here. Please use the YouTube Live chat to
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Live stream: Explaining my 750 line compiler+runtime designed to GPU self-host(youtube.com)
10 points by arcfide 10y ago|6 comments
93.
by arcfide 10y ago
> Not my experience at all - if anything I'd say visual aspects tend to be a marker of less rigorous communcation. I would point to the field of combinatorics, the traditional proofs of both the ancient Chinese mathematicians as wel
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by arcfide 10y ago
It's a fair point you make. Regarding semantic density, what you talk about is density maintenance at a single point, that is, the density of a single function. I'm not saying that APL is unique in that respect. I'm saying th
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by arcfide 10y ago
Update. I'll be giving this live session on Monday the 13th at 3 PM EST. Stay tuned for a post on HN near that time for the link to the live session.
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by arcfide 10y ago
I'd be very surprised if your industry really did use complete pseudocode and only elided error handling. On the other hand, you're sort of assuming in your conclusion that pseudocode is the "better way" for languages be
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by arcfide 10y ago
I disagree a little bit, but agree with you in part. You're drawing a distinction between codebase tersity and business processes. See my other reply here about Direct Development. One of the better ways to do APL development is to wri
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by arcfide 10y ago
There are some good points here. I'm fine with reduction in constant factors when it comes to productivity. I personally find that those constant factors are the bigger issue in day to day work anyways. And part of the problem is that
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by arcfide 10y ago
Because some languages are better tools of thought than others for certain disciplines. Linguists have demonstrated that language itself has a shaping on the way in which people approach and see problems. While I could have chosen Japanese,
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by arcfide 10y ago
You're asserting that this isn't multi-programmer friendly. I'll agree that it's not "code monkey" friendly, but I disagree that it is not oriented towards multiple programmers. And the APL language has almost
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by arcfide 10y ago
I look forward to convincing you of the simplicity of the code base. :-) The sentence was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek sort of rhetoric. In particular, if you look up most of those words in the relevant domains, they're all standard prac
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by arcfide 10y ago
It does. Furthermore, he's "simplified" APL in K to require less infrastructure, with fewer primitives, and the like. Combined with some clever, and some would argue, devious programming practices, he's able to keep thin
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by arcfide 10y ago
I would tend to agree. It's certainly a generally good rule of thumb. However, I've honestly struggled to find a way to document the naming conventions that is useful. Every time I've wondered about a particular name, it&#x27
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by arcfide 10y ago
At this point, if I get sick, the code doesn't move much. If I were permanently disabled, this someone else could take over. I have people contribute bugs, tests, and other things fairly often. If you had to temporarily work on the cod
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by arcfide 10y ago
As for what is harder and what is not, it's not really so much a matter of easier and harder. By replacing all of the normal techniques with equivalent ones, it's more just programming in a different style that nets more benefits.
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by arcfide 10y ago
I've structured the points free style so that it's basically like working with any expression, I just am working with expressions that build functions instead of expressions that build values. The compiler is very functional in st
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by arcfide 10y ago
Sorry! I just realized that I forgot to answer the question about file names. The filenames themselves are a bit of a cultural homage to historical APL development. They are a little bit of a part of my push to stay small, because if I go b
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by arcfide 10y ago
Oh, and on another note, I've found that it's mostly programmers and computer scientists who struggle the most with the code. I've tried this style of programming out with high school students with little to no programming ba
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by arcfide 10y ago
Don't worry about offending me with that comment. I have a pretty strong belief in why I'm coding this way, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to work with people like you who find the code scary and disgusting and see if I
110.
by arcfide 10y ago
There is a development method called "Direct Development" which has arisen as a term to describe the organic programming model that many profitable APL endeavors have followed. It helps to eliminate the issue of metrics by elimina
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by arcfide 10y ago
I can provide even better. If you look at the Publications: https://github.com/arcfide/Co-dfns#publications You can read the "Key" paper that walks you through one of the core data structures in the compiler
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by arcfide 10y ago
This is a commercially funded project, there are other people reading and working with the code. There's just rarely a reason for them to commit any changes.
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by arcfide 10y ago
You can go through the Dyalog meetings and see how APL scales up and down along the spectrums. I'm glad you think my compiler is a small system. The problem I'm solving is one that people said was simply too difficult and impracti
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by arcfide 10y ago
V for Vector is an appropriate, but not the only, interpretation for that letter. In the case of this compiler, I take an opposite convention. Most single character names are globally meaningful, and their meaning rarely, if ever changes ac
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by arcfide 10y ago
Thanks for the comments. I would encourage you to attend or watch the recording of the live session once it is done, as it will give a more thorough answer than I can give here as to why. I've talked a little about the motivations for
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by arcfide 10y ago
The live session would be the first start, obviously, but you can also see the Publications area of the README: https://github.com/arcfide/Co-dfns#publications Some of that deals with the micro and some with the macro
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by arcfide 10y ago
It's something I've been working on for a while, but because the architecture is under constant flex, it's actually more valuable to be able to know how to "experience" or discover the architecture in the compiler c
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by arcfide 10y ago
Done.
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by arcfide 10y ago
Indeed, many of these ideas as expressed in APL come from the 1962 book, "A Programming Language." I find it unfortunate that these ideas are only now beginning to find some general acceptance in larger, more mainstream languages.
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by arcfide 10y ago
Understandable. However, it won't be necessary to know APL to understand what I'm going to talk about. I might delve into a bit of APL, but only from the perspective of how to work with the code. My hope is that the more general l

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