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> I solve and write a lot of puzzlehunts, and I wanted a better programming language to use to search word lists for words satisfying unusual constraints, such as, “Find all ten-letter words that contain each of the letters A, B, and C exactly once and that have the ninth letter K.” So... Perl?
grep { len($_) == 10 && /^[^a]*a[^a]*$/i && /^[^b]*b[^b]*$/i && /^[^c]*c[^c]*$/i && /k.$/i } @words;
> Before we move on, I want to point out that “being able to write code from left to right without backtracking” is a completely bonkers thing to optimize a programming language for. This should not be anywhere in the top hundred priorities for any “serious programming language”! There are plenty of serious languages that are written this way. Most noticeably are shell scripting languages but I’ve seen stack based an…
3 negated + 2 negated.
array at:4 at:2 at:1.
array at:4;
at:2;
at:1.
array at:4.
array at:2.
array at:1.
((array at:4) at:2) at:1.
array at:4 | at:2 | at:1.
A second way of looking at it is as a version of the pipe/filter architectural style, with each message expression being a filter, the results from the filter on the left piped into the filter on the right as the receiver. This is a little bit like |> in some FP languages. But really only a little bit, because in Objective-S this is not the whole story, but just a way of integrating messaging into the way the pipe/filter architectural style is supported at the language level.
* I couldn’t really make operators first class functions, but I just autoimported operator which has this but in words
* I wanted partial application and hated lambda syntax, so I hacked it together with some magic. “_0 + 1” is basically equivalent to lambda x: x + 1
* Python really likes to make everything a free function, which messes with the whole left-to-right thing. So I monkey-patched functional methods onto all the collections
Together this means that if I have like a comma separated list of numbers in str and I want to, idk, count how many are above five I’d do something like
str.split(",").map(int).filter(_0 > 5).len
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that a whole lot more "being able to write code without making a lot of dumb mistakes", which is a feature of the programer. So it boils down to getting gud and practice?
No, what the author is discussing is a syntax thing. Lets take a hypothetical C-like language: result = C(B(A())) In this your result is on the left hand side. The first function to be executed is A and then B and lastly C, which also reads right to left. This is a pretty common way to write code, it's by no means unique to C-like languages. So you'd have gotten so good at reading code like this that you probably don…
result = A().B().C()
> I solve and write a lot of puzzlehunts, and I wanted a better programming language to use to search word lists for words satisfying unusual constraints, such as, “Find all ten-letter words that contain each of the letters A, B, and C exactly once and that have the ninth letter K.” So... Perl?
grep { len($_) == 10 && /^[^a]*a[^a]*$/i && /^[^b]*b[^b]*$/i && /^[^c]*c[^c]*$/i && /k.$/i } @words; Is there a simpler way?
my @found = grep {
local $_ = lc;
length == 10 &&
substr($_,8,1) eq "k" &&
join("",sort [/([abc])/g]->@*) eq "abc"
} @words;> I solve and write a lot of puzzlehunts, and I wanted a better programming language to use to search word lists for words satisfying unusual constraints, such as, “Find all ten-letter words that contain each of the letters A, B, and C exactly once and that have the ninth letter K.” So... Perl?
grep { len($_) == 10 && /^[^a]*a[^a]*$/i && /^[^b]*b[^b]*$/i && /^[^c]*c[^c]*$/i && /k.$/i } @words; Is there a simpler way?
$ grep '^........k.$' /usr/share/dict/words | grep a | grep b | grep c | grep -v 'a.*a' | grep -v 'b.*b' | grep -v 'c.*c'
backstroke
bailiwicks
benchmarks
branchlike
bushwhacks
greenbacks
matchbooks
piggybacks
roadblocks
scrapbooks
slingbacks
throwbacks
thumbtacksI think it’s interesting how similar a lot of this stuff is to what I do, except I’m not very good at Advent of Code and also I decided to hack Python to do this instead of writing my own language. For example: * I couldn’t really make operators first class functions, but I just autoimported operator which has this but in words * I wanted partial application and hated lambda syntax, so I hacked it together with some…
I think it’s interesting how similar a lot of this stuff is to what I do, except I’m not very good at Advent of Code and also I decided to hack Python to do this instead of writing my own language. For example: * I couldn’t really make operators first class functions, but I just autoimported operator which has this but in words * I wanted partial application and hated lambda syntax, so I hacked it together with some…
reads a bit like javascript now. You might want to consider switching languages
I think it’s interesting how similar a lot of this stuff is to what I do, except I’m not very good at Advent of Code and also I decided to hack Python to do this instead of writing my own language. For example: * I couldn’t really make operators first class functions, but I just autoimported operator which has this but in words * I wanted partial application and hated lambda syntax, so I hacked it together with some…
reads a bit like javascript now. You might want to consider switching languages