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Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

> Readability is a property of the reader, not the language.

Uiua[0]'s stack model is much more annoying to work with, but I really appreciate its embrace of unicode glyphs. Every other derivative of APL throws those out at the first opportunity, but when you have a lot of glyphs, you stop being so tempted to make different arities cause the same glyph to mean wildly different things, when the arity is not actually written down explicitly and depends on whether the next thing to the left is a parameter or another function. Once you can See The Matrix, this is the chief thing that still does make K and friends objectively unreadable in a way they don't have to be.

[0]: https://uiua.org

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I appreciate the idea (and Uiua's examples indeed look beautiful, almost like visual programming) but I'd at least like some obvious way how to pronounce the code.

All of the symbols in Uiua have short english words as alternate names, and the online editor allows you to type them by alias.

K has "traditional names" for all the primitive operators which appear in reference cards and which are typically used when discussing code aloud with other K programmers. Q and Lil, which are both K descendants, outright replace some symbols with those named keywords. Named keywords can make the primitives superficially easier to remember, at the cost of making idiomatic patterns in the language less visually apparent.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

Original quote is just mind-bogglingly stupid. If If I can't read any programming language, that's a defect on my part. If I can read pretty much any language except k and brainfuck, that's a sign k is particularly difficult to read.

How’s your Korean?

Korean is not a programming language

It's also a terrible comparison since Korea's writing system was created specifically to be easy to learn, write, and read.

> Original quote is just mind-bogglingly stupid.

To be frank, your quote is mind-bogglingly stupid. How easy do you think Java is to read to a native Greek speaker with no English language knowledge? Would the Java standard library be as easy for you to read if it were written in Greek? Would java still be an easy to read language if all the keywords and library were in Greek?

If your only definition of a good programming language is one written in your native language and a PL becomes bad if written in a different language, then your criteria is terrible/useless. And right now that's your criteria.

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