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I am thinking that Perl is (probably) the computer language which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing. I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.
Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.
That's one of the things keeping me away from Haskell. It seems that to be proficient I would need to know way more beyond the "standard library", but go into the String vs Text debates, and the huge amounts of common knowledge out there.
Text is a compact and efficient representation, more similar to strings in other languages.
As far as learning libraries: its not mandatory and you can code as well as anywhere else without them, but the "language enhancing libraries" are undeniably useful, and can do some incredibly useful things. Monad transformers let you merge computational contexts, Conduit lets you cleanly define stream transformations, Lens lets you manipulate specific aspects of some state in a context, etc.
I have to say though that the Thai language can be spoken relatively calmly and soothingly, but when spoken by in anger or in a particular kind of formality, it sounds quite similar to the language used in the movie. Doesn't matter if it's a male or female speaker, to a westerner it sounds like.. well, the crazy martians from Mars Attacks.
This is actually mentioned in the extras bits on the original Mars Attacks DVD from like 1998 or 1999 or so. They did use Thai language as the main inspiration for the language of the martians.
I am thinking that Perl is (probably) the computer language which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing. I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.
You cannot really have too much builtin operators, they are basically functions that don't depend on context (i.e. on type of the object). The only side effect is that some of them are not going to be used often and you'll need a quick way to look them up to be able to understand the code in those cases.
However, having too few of them is a problem that leads to contextual dual meaning operators (like '+' in many languages), related cognitive overhead and bugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.
That's one of the things keeping me away from Haskell. It seems that to be proficient I would need to know way more beyond the "standard library", but go into the String vs Text debates, and the huge amounts of common knowledge out there.
Most of the debates either have answers (use Text instead of String, most of the time) or don't matter to most people (MTL vs transformers or monadLib). In my mind, it's no worse than trying to pick a JavaScript framework. If you're interested, give it a shot some day.
Coincidentally, I just now posted the below to my Facebook. > Taa (or !Xoo) is one of the most phonetically complex languages in the world[0]. Here is a video[1] of a !Xoo speaker reading a paragraph of text in English, and then reading the translation of that same text in !Xoo. The number and variety of phonetic clicks is simply amazing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language [1]: https://www.youtube.com/wa…
I am thinking that Perl is (probably) the computer language which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing. I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.
Interestingly, the same might be true with languages. Quechua (from the Andean Mountains) only has three vowels (a, i, u). I can't find a reference, but AFAIK the main hypothesis was that a 3-vowel system made it easier to communicate across longer distances (i.e. across a canyon or valley in the Andes).
A long time ago I was interested in finding out what the intersection of all languages sounds would be, would it be an empty set or was there enough overlap that someone designing the next esperanto could build it using universal sounds thus allowing any human speaker to pronunciate it without difficulty. Turns out there is a good degree of overlap if you allow for a very small bit of fuzzyness. For instance, 'a','m'…
Esperanto's phonotactics is basically Zamenhof's Slavic dialect (Polish and Belorussian). However, Lojban tries for a more neutral disposition, even to the point of permitting epenthetic vowels in complex consonant clusters (stressing that they need to be distinguishable from the 6 regular vowels--the 5 vowels above plus /ə/).
It should be noted that when languages have restrictive phonemic inventories, the challenge is not so much in producing the other sounds as it is in recognizing them as distinct sounds.