Hacker News Reader

Comment by arijun | Hacker News Reader

An obvious compromise is to have a dual representation, one terse and one that’s spelled out. You could then toggle between them when seeing unfamiliar symbols.

The fact that nobody selling me on these arcane runes talks about something like that tells me it’s more about code golf for them.

View on HN

I don't want to do the same things for boolean operations, or arithmetic, or pointer (de-)referencing in C like languages. Why would I want to do so when equally familiar with a larger range of symbolic operations?

Somehow the usual culprits of +-/*|^&% get a free pass on this, and are somehow less arcane than symbols like ⍋ or ⊃.

There's nothing inherent about this, it's about familiarity, and once familiar, everyone always prefers the symbols over spelling it out like plus, minus, divide, multiply...

The lack of familiarity was exactly my point? If you make a new language with a + symbol but spelled out the other functions, newcomers would understand it immediately. If you have whatever that Christmas tree symbol is, newcomers will be continuously looking up what they mean. You are making the language harder to learn for the sake of code golf.

And if you had a toggle-able mode, you could still have your code golf.

It’s funny because lisp enthusiasts will say “yes, lisp is harder to learn with all the parentheses, but trust me, it’s worth it” And then list some actual benefits.

Whereas APL fans will insist it’s not hard while listing no benefits besides dense code.

well yeah, dense code is the whole argument. It means you don't have to know any library, because it's so dense you can just write the whole thing from basic elements. You never have to look up anything!*

* except for the fact you're supposed to remember the idioms for everything : https://aplwiki.com/wiki/FinnAPL_idiom_library

The usual culprits show up on standard keyboards. That’s a huge advantage.

For what is worth, you can use the keywords 'and', 'or', 'xor' etc. in C an C++ like you can in python. I for one greatly prefer them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com