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Comment by rezmason | Hacker News Reader

My dad used array languages throughout his career— APL at some point, A+ at Morgan Stanley, and K later on at Conning, a finance modeling company serving the insurance industry. They moved what I think is a flagship product (a macroeconomic monte carlo sim thingamajig) from K to Julia a while ago. Here's his old boss at JuliaCon talking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE2yz0ptSzQ

I don't think he keeps any old code lying around, but in the past I've tried reading it without success. That makes me a DSF— a Domain Specific Failson :[

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Heh, I consult in finance and there’s so much k/q code out there. It’s like the ultimate expert-friendly language, it’s extremely powerful, but it really takes a lot of dedication to learn, in a similar way that “pure” functional programming languages also take a lot of effort to learn if all you ever did was imperative programming.

I spent a couple of months last year learning q. When I went back to it this year, I realized it would take significant effort just to refresh my skills. I now program for fun in gawk.

It’s a bit like dismissing Chinese because you can’t read the letters I think.

But perhaps another failing of the current array languages is that they are sort of walled gardens. Not as easy to integrate or modularise as something like JS/Python (on the other end of the PL spectrum.

Computer language design is an intersection of applied mathematics, computer science, individual psychology, group dynamics, and history.

Syntax doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There is a significant adoption advantage that can be gained by reusing popular idioms. This is why QWERTY is more popular than Dvorak long after mechanical typewriter arms or even permanently marked mechanical keys! I’m pecking this out on a phone keyboard which is just software.

I don't know that's a concern for users of the languages. When you can spend years tuning and optimizing a 'program' that fits in a tweet, those other things don't really have a chance to get involved.

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