I recently ran into the APL phenomena. Well, it wasn’t the first time I heard about it, but this time I didn’t dismiss it as some kind of legacy m

APL in the eyes of a Python programmer

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2021-06-10 21:30:03

I recently ran into the APL phenomena. Well, it wasn’t the first time I heard about it, but this time I didn’t dismiss it as some kind of legacy mistake from the 70:s when you paid for code by the character. If you haven’t seen APL before here’s a (slightly modified) example from Wikipedia that computes all prime numbers between 1 and 10:

Only 19 characters, but completely unr eadable right? So why even bother? What happened is that I ran into a thread on hacker news where a proponent of such languages got a chance to tell his story. This person was Aaron W. Hs under the nickname arcfide and he was responding to a comment about his work. The work in question was a compiler written in the programming language Dyalog, a language similar to APL and the comment provided a short simple from the code base and just the word “No”.

I can highly recommend reading the thread that followed if you got the time. What I got out from it was the lesson that sometime fitting a lot of code in a small space has advantages that can, at least for some people, outweigh the drawbacks of having code that if far from obvious for the untrained eye.

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