APL vs Types

i always feel like i need a second, stronger brain when i watch aaron give talks

This is probably a good thread to cross-link my long comment at https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1615095740104000?thread_ts=1610568464.476800&cid=C5U3SEW6A

@Kartik Agaram A small note on the above: although they are quite different languages, APL and FORTH share the property — via point free style — that programs are usually made up of a small stream of composable tokens, which makes them both very dense and amenable to rapid pattern matching of the kind Hsu mentions in that video.

I think I mostly agree. There's a difference of degree, right? By making names a single grapheme (and not having a widely shared convention on line length?) APL is signalling a communal willingness to far greater compression, and a far smaller namespace. Forth seems to me to encourage creating new names.

APL is definitely more extreme here, though one does create new verbs in APL as well. The "single grapheme" point reminds me to mention that, aesthetically speaking, I find the switch from APL's symbol set to the multi-character symbols in J extremely unsightly, making everything look less like maths and more like line noise.

On that note, I'm curious to hear feedback about Mu's verbose long names. I've tried a variety of styles in the past, and so it's quite likely that what I have right now is just a phase. Some drawbacks of it: * multi-word variables make it hard to tell when one variable ends and the next begins * long variables can drown out short ones * it's hard sometimes to separate action from subject. My instruction names don't get a comma after them, everything else on the line does. I'm not sure if that's too subtle.

My answer based on decades of experience is... it depends. 🤷🏻‍♂️

🙂 I just went looking for examples so I'll throw out a couple. Relatively benign: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/life.mu.html More malignant: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/tile/environment.mu.html#L100

I like these kind of long descriptive names in environments where most of the typing happens via computer assistance (completion interfaces, &c). They work against the hyper compressed APL "look for the pattern at a glance" thing a little bit, but they have the positive property of being extremely clear (when the names are good names, which -- as we all know -- is itself quite difficult to assure).