Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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I was tempted to agree after a glance at this thread but thought this looked like APL. Checking on the project confirmed it's an APL variant. APL is some weird-looking stuff I've never even tried to learn as I believed I didn't need it in place of languages + libraries that do similar jobs well with familiarity. The previous threads on HN about APL had similarly-weird code that the APL vets showing up thought was anywhere from fine to beautiful. This tells me we can't judge the quality of APL-like code unless we've dug into that paradigm and know what good, APL-like code looks like. Like other paradigms that are really different.

Are your an experienced user of array-oriented, programming languages? If so, what specific things about the code were bad other than the shortened names someone else mentioned?

Did the above code snippet remind you of APL or was it something else? This is actually a bit of an important "research" oriented question to me and is actually relevant to the design of the Co-dfns compiler.

Remember I said I don't do APL. It reminded me of things I've seen in APL-oriented submissions or comments. All of it looked equally ugly to the uninitiated. The main point is that I couldn't tell the difference between a bad or good example since I don't do APL. So, dang's point stands that we shouldn't be quick to dismiss it without evidence it's bad. That's a decent point in general but especially for stuff really outside the norm such as APL-derived languages.

So, as I mention above, part of the intentional design of that code snippet is to "feel" like APL. The fact that you went to that somehow is a good thing, actually. While it might have seemed as equally ugly, if it felt in the same "class" as APL, that's at least in the right direction, because as a part of the design of the style of this code, it is to mirror the semantic and stylistic densities of APL to improve the reading transition between APL code and C-style code.

That's what I was saying. That it was so similar was clear. Past that, cant say cuz no experience in it.

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