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Stages of denial in encountering K

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Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#291

Post by wpietri »

chrispsn wrote: post #108
hmry wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "amount" of code is the same as in any functional language though. It's just written in a smaller text file.

Arthur tries to choose primitives carefully so that the amount of steps is smaller than other languages (see the 'product' quote in another comment). So even if you give each symbol an English name, the code will often end up smaller.

In which case it seems like two things are being conflated a lot here: terseness and better primitives. I'm opposed to the first, but very interested in the second. Is there a language you think focuses on approachability and readability but keeps the good parts of K?

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#292

Post by kick »

magicalhippo wrote: post #265
kick wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus the source code is essentially compressed code and, as we know, compression makes thing more random hence more noise-like. This is wrong. k programs aren't really random at all. It's not even that complicated; it has less than thirty primitives. It's a notation for representing ideas, and it excels at that. Dyalog APL is similarly terse, although less so, and the goal of it isn't to be terse. This criticism stil…

> This is wrong. k programs aren't really random at all. The k source code posted around here are certainly more random than a similar byte count of say Java code. Try zipping 1000 bytes of either. > notation isn't golfing, it's a convenient way to express thought Sure. But up to a point. And it seems to go beyond pure notation. Check out the interpreter posted here: https://bitbucket.org/ngn/k/ It _requires_ a readm…

It doesn't "require" a README file to explain anything. cc has a man page; when was the last time you checked it?

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009876

How would a new user know what this did without checking the definition?

Why would somebody want to know what it does without checking the definition? The definition isn't complex, and the program can be read and kept in your head in the span of a minute. It's also well-commented.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#293

Post by sedachv »

kick wrote: post #51
sedachv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/ Most likely available through your package manager.

Better: Free software K interpreter: https://bitbucket.org/ngn/k/ Arthur's K interpreter isn't actually that expensive for casual use anymore (it's free for most non-commercial use and you can download it off the Shakti website pretty easily), though. Not that I'd recommend it: Arthur's a genius, but nothing's worth using proprietary software for. What I usually recommend for learning the paradigm is J, largely becau…

There are a lot of books, tutorials, and papers on APL and APL2, which are applicable to GNU APL.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#294

Post by goto11 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #260
jmnicolas wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather read 30 lines of Java (yes Java !) than try to decipher one line of K !

Matter of taste; I cannot imagine having to program Java (give me Clojure/Scala any time if jvm is required) for a living anymore; deciphering a lovely 200000 class codebase where every call in every 30 lines bring you into a deep spelunking trying to figure out where/how/what and hoping it's not in some ancient undocumented .jar etc. So I have very much the opposite of what you have. Then again, I have been doing k/…

> the brilliant imagination of people who like to use design patterns 'just a bit' wrong for everything.

I assume you are comparing this to deciphering and maintaining K-code written by developers who uses all the idioms just a bit wrong?

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#295

Post by skybrian »

geocar wrote: post #213
sriram_malhar wrote: post #202

I love the brevity of regular expressions and use them on a daily basis. It is the same argument that keeps me returning to K: the syntax is terse and compact, the semantics are simple and composable, and your eyes get used to it. Beyond a point however, I cannot read my own regex's after a month's absence. Which is why I use perl's /x modifier extensively to split up regex components onto multiple lines and to docum…

> https://a.kx.com/a/k/examples/xml.k > Where's the pedagogy? Where are the comments? Most of that document _is_ comments. There's a comment on almost every line, very similar to your perl example. Comments begin with a "/" character which doesn't have a function to the left (e.g. whitespace). First we have some constants (L,W,B,S,R) which refer to the left-bracket, whitespace (which includes blank), blank space, and…

If the comments were good (more like you wrote) then the ratio of comments to text would be even higher. And as with writing assembly, the risk of comments getting out of sync with the code is higher, too.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#296

Post by bartread »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #157
bartread wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree: falls into the category of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Actually, that's perhaps a bit harsh. I have some pretty obscure hobbies, and there's certainly nothing wrong with doing this sort of thing if you want to. Still, having done so it's a bit rich to then look askance at the rest of us like we're all idiots for not choosing to go down a similar route with our own systems.

I suspect everyone would love K if they had an extra 30 IQ points to work with. The reason we have Python, Javascript, and Java is because most people (including me) just aren't bright enough to work fluently in these terse APL-alike idioms. They fail because it's hard for most people to keep that many terse symbols and symbolic relationships in memory at the same time, without English labelling and all the other usu…

IQ points aren't really anything to do with it: I suspect most programmers, and certainly those who are average or better, could learn to be proficient with K if they invested the time.

The real issue is knowing your userbase.

Example: we have this in-house DSL that's been around for years and uses a symbolic representation not a million miles from K that we use for automating reports. The problem is it's a pain to onboard people who, whilst they're bright enough, aren't programmers and in any case have many other responsibilities to attend to. Giving them something more readable rather than arcane makes life easier for everyone.

And fundamentally we want to make it easy for everyone, not just the top quartile or the top 10%, to quickly crank out high quality automated reports across different market sectors, geos, etc., as well as to modify and maintain these reports into the future.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#297

Post by pianoben »

chongli wrote: post #75
pianoben wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CS program (class of 2007) was mostly c++. There was one semester of Java, but it was optional. We learned fundamentals, discrete math, symbolic logic, and also "databases" (read: MS Access), object-oriented design, and I forget what else. With the benefit of hindsight, I feel like I overpaid for that education :)

I’m a math student minoring in CS and I covered all of that before I’d finished second year. I also covered functional programming in first year. I’m really surprised your CS degree didn’t cover operating systems, compilers, or algorithms. CS students at my school are required to take all of that stuff (and a lot more, including everything you’ve mentioned) before they even finish 3rd year. In 4th year they’ll be stu…

Ah yes, operating systems - file that under "I forget what else".

Like I said, I feel that I overpaid for that education. The degree itself has paid for itself many times over, but I needed to learn basically everything important for a CS career on my own.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#298

Post by bartread »

dang wrote: post #107

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.

I think this is something of a strawman: there are plenty of million line (plus) systems and software suites, but I think million line programs are relatively uncommon by comparison.

Especially so if you don't count library code, and I don't because otherwise you end up doing things like counting the number of lines of code that back the Win32 APIs in your program line count, which doesn't seem sensible. Most of the time we treat libraries as black boxes, except on rare occasions, so don't tend to think of them as part of "our" codebase[1].

Most million line plus systems are broken down into subsystems (applications, services, libraries, etc.) that in isolation are smaller, and in many cases much smaller.

Even with those rare million line of code monoliths, for the most part there's some level of organisation in the codebase: layers, subsystems, components, or a mixture of these and whatever else is appropriate.

This organisation, and particularly when coupled with modern tooling, facilitates the understanding of even very large systems.

I don't say that it's necessarily easy but, then again, neither is understanding a large, complex system implemented in K.

[1] Except when thinking about security because third party code has been shown to be a rich source of vulnerabilities.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#299

Post by Jtsummers »

kick wrote: post #287
loeg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100 or 1000x claim is extraordinary. Do you have any factual basis for repeatedly asserting it?

Contrived Debian shootout benchmarks: http://www.kparc.com/z/comp.k https://web.archive.org/web/http://shootout.alioth.debian.or... Note that the relevant k program here is contained entirely on the last line of code and denoted by a comment telling you what it does: http://www.kparc.com/z/fun.k http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WardNumberInManyProgrammingLangua... Most Joy people are also k people, and Joy appears to be th…

You should probably label your columns, but that seems to be wc output.

The Scheme and Haskell versions are actually shorter than you imply since they include the pairings in the count (when the pairings in the code are examples). Additionally, the k version is one line longer than you suggest. The definition of a is on its own line is used in the solution. Still only 2 lines, but if you want to persuade you should probably have correct numbers.

Re: Stages of denial in encountering K

#300

Post by 7thaccount »

wcarss wrote: post #252
geocar wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it's not perfectly readable. That, or your definition of readable is useless because then any programming language is readable given enough study time. Given a fragment of Chinese, if you do not know Chinese, would you say it is unreadable? What possible definition of "unreadable" could you have that would make that a useful statement? No, I don't think speaking to a language as being "unreadable" is particula…

Sorry to start popping up on all of your threads! Your points are really good here, and writing code that runs faster and finding a solution yourself faster are clear wins for a language. I think the value of those wins is subjective, though. If you need speed of execution, or if you're working in a green-field scenario and need to get your work done super fast, your wins are the most valuable ones. But for example,…

I'm not sure many people use K to write crud applications in the way you're thinking.

Kdb+ is fully integrated K and a K-like query language running on an SSD array database built for array languages and stock/banking usage. Can you write a web app in it? Sure, but I doubt very many do and those that do probably just use K as the numerical engine and JS for everything else.

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