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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

She implemented Conway's Game of Life, which is substantially easier than reinventing it. Here is someone implementing it in eight minutes in APL, while explaining it, and futzing around with other stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4.

Also, I don't really understand the suspicion this gets here. Where's the win in giving someone the Spanish inquisition for posting something cool? What's the upside of this skepticism? Does it accomplish something useful? It's not like this person is trying to sell you something or has any reason to deceive you.

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I totally get what you mean about the skepticism, and I really didn't aim to sound like a spoilsport.

However, any would-be (I'm talking zero experience) programmer that looks to this for inspiration is going to be demotivated by not being able to come anywhere near this progress. Because it's not possible. It's deceiving. The website presents itself as a resume or a portfolio, and in a way it does feel like it's selling something: herself.

Yes Conway's Game of Life, Pixel Paint, etc. can be made in surprisingly limited time and code, but not by a novice programmer. We're talking about having to grasp variables, lists, function calls - basic stuff - that given no prior knowledge may take weeks alone.

This is someone with a solid understanding of programming and who has borrowed (very skillfully I'll say) from tutorials and examples - very good skills to have, but separate from her claim.

Where do you draw the line between cheating and referencing? If I made a Game of Life implementation, would you think differently of it based on whether I had used YouTube rather than Wikipedia to learn about the specifics of the problem? Or is it a matter of not copying-and-pasting -- something which I do occasionally even in professional work?

> We're talking about having to grasp variables, lists, function calls - basic stuff - that given no prior knowledge may take weeks alone.

Not true at all. I had no prior programming knowledge when I began Objective-C and all of that was grasped within a week no problem. Pointers were easy to get. Arrays couldn't be easier (even multi-level). Things are so much easier when you aren't sitting in a class and getting told things are hard. Cause most of the time they aren't.

this is the first time I've seen APL... and I have to say, as a competent programmer who knows a good few languages backwards, I now know what it must look like when my wife looks over my shoulder when I'm coding... total alien hieroglyphics!

It's not as magical as it seems. Just a lot of single-character, composable functions. You could probably do the same thing in Haskell. (I mean it does look cool but . . .)

but the matrix operations and concepts used in that video is probably beyond a self-taught web programmer (i.e., me :P)

APL and C/C++ were my first languages (and that was in a high pressure 90 hour/week trading/underwriting situation). There's a lot of abstraction in APL but the gestalt is closest to scheme/racket, i think. The language lives on in J and K languages, you can read some here

http://www.reddit.com/r/apljk

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