131–140 of 432 posts
The irony of claiming to represent a readable language, that others are in denial of reality about this, and presenting your thesis on a '90s looking website with typographic lines spanning almost 400 chars at 100% width... ABTASTTSBMR than the whole sentence. OK.
A million-line program isn't readable by anybody, no matter how readable the language is. If the equivalent program can be written in, say, a thousand lines in some more concise language, that's more than worth the learning curve, even if the language is strange and off-putting.
Only if it's written in a style which affords reading. K programmers seem to want to write their code in a mathematical style, but without the natural language prose which makes mathematical papers readable. In a paper by a mature mathematician, the equations only perform some of the work in expressing the idea. The rest of the work is done by prose written with an intent to be lucidly expository, to allow the notati…
More than you would think. I had a very nice gig at a hft years ago where we were using noweb+k extensively.
The only place were I edited source code by hand with paper, pen and paste.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit more convincing: http://www.kparc.com/edit.k Properly formatted and with comments, it almost looks readable. The insistence to use one- or two-letter identifiers that you then have to look up the meaning of in a comment makes it look pretty childish, though. "Look ma, it's still super terse even when doing something real!" Yes kid, it is when you refuse to do the one obvious thing that could actually make it re…
Single-letter identifiers are a natural thing to object to when coming from other language paradigms, i.e. nearly every programming background out there, but this is a category error. What seems ridiculous in one context can be sensible in another. The objection turns out to be parochial. It reminds me of how people think that parentheses are a significant aspect of Lisp, when in practice they're not. The parens look…
A million-line program isn't readable by anybody, no matter how readable the language is. If the equivalent program can be written in, say, a thousand lines in some more concise language, that's more than worth the learning curve, even if the language is strange and off-putting.
The example with a for-loop for summing a range is a blatant strawman. In which modern language would that be idiomatic?
Furthermore the examples only show a particular use case: Processing lists of numbers. How does the benefits measure up for all the other stuff a million-line program does?
That said, if you really have a million-line program doing mostly numerical processing, then I'm sure it would be a massive benefit to switch to a programming language optimized for this task.
A million-line program isn't readable by anybody, no matter how readable the language is. If the equivalent program can be written in, say, a thousand lines in some more concise language, that's more than worth the learning curve, even if the language is strange and off-putting.
author ended article with > Leaning back in your chair, you think to yourself: > |/ what does this translate into?
However, I still find it problematic, and it's not really about the language itself: it's more about how it's promoted in the article, by the people in this thread, and in general. Specifically, the claims it's perfectly readable, and anyone who says anything otherwise is either stupid, lying, or too poor to understand it are not useful. (Yes, you know who you are for that last one. You're not helping your case.) The fact of the matter is that most programmers are used to ALGOL-esque syntax, and there is significant value in being able to lift concepts and interoperate between those languages at a superficial level. Every "inspired" languages hits these issues, depending on how "strange" it is: Objective-C is ugly, Lisp is alien, and on the far end APL derivatives are simply labelled as unreadable. That doesn't mean they're bad languages, but to those promoting it: drop the attitude, and understand why we have reservations. Your language isn't the "true" way to program, that only the chosen elect can understand and lecture us on. Don't ignore or gloss over languages that have similar features to yours. We want to hear what the interesting things are that you can do in the language, actual guidance for how we can adapt to the language (not: "one-letter identifiers are just what we do; deal with it"). Thanks.
>>> xs
'34210'
>>> grade(xs)
[4, 3, 2, 0, 1]
>>> grade(grade(xs))
[3, 4, 2, 1, 0] # :O
grade = lambda xs: (
[i for (i,_) in sorted(enumerate(xs), key=swap)]
)
swap = lambda p: (p[1], p[0])
(i guess "ordinal" really is too ambiguous...)
EDIT
alright, i see it now - `<<xs` is "for each item x of xs, where does x land when you sort xs?