Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming language design, like programming, is about finding the right abstractions and providing them. ref: " Python did take usability into account " Which APL tries to do with neat and composable functions. Sum a list of "values": APL: +/values Python: sum(values). Product of a list: APL: ×/values Python: import operator, functools, then reduce with a lambda function, or write a loop. Add constant to a list: AP…
You examples with (and some without) numpy arrays: values.sum(), values.prod(), 1 + values, values[::-1], values1 + values2, values[:5] Yes, comparing the "array programming language" with a general purpose programming language when all your examples are array operations is going to make the general purpose language look funny. But I don't want a DSL for array operations I want a programming language. And when you ar…
Say that our modern day programmer is comfortable with + × > In Python, that is many standalone disconnected patterns which do not compose, In APL the "and more" is because composability means there are lots of ways of putting these operations together. values.prod() is what you have to do without composability, you can't re-use the builtin multiply without making a separate wrapper or overload. The result is visually different to sum(values) and conceptually different because it is a method call on an object, and the resulting prod() does not compose with anything else in the language.
Show me how you present those arrays as a graph in APL. In "wordy, verbose" python it's [three lines, another third party install, an import and rename, a two stage operation and a bizarre array show() call passing itself as a parameter(?)]. Is visualizing the data you're manipulating so basic?
Yes, in Dyalog APL it's:
]chart array
when all your examples are array operations is going to make the general purpose language look funny.
Yes, true. But is it not the everyday task of programming to process chunks of data in collections?
I don't want a DSL for array operations I want a programming language. And when you aren't doing array-math, APL isn't so great.
Strings are character vectors, like Python lets you treat strings as iterables and slice them, so you can do many array transforms on text. APL's array operations aren't limited to numeric math like +5 or A×B, they also work on something I don't know what to call it - geometric patterns, maybe? Like, indicate where 5 is less than integers to ten:
5 ¯3 ⌽ 3 And yes you could pull in Numpy and fill an array with values and rotate it, but you wouldn't think to do that to apply it to a string, because it's /so much work/ and so far away and distant from the provided black-box string methods.
That is, APL is so great for things more than array-math. Albeit not everything more than array math. I sure have my own skepticism and questions about how well it scales up to larger programs and where its practical and pragmatic limits are.
But, take some imaginary pixels in one array and brightnesses in another and (50 50]]. The APL is "dense and unreadable" and the Python is "clear and composable". "Oh you wouldn't do that in Python", no indeed you wouldn't, you'd have to put stuff in a tuple or object to work around the fact that Python won't let you keep simple things simple.