A cool re-thinking of APL-style array languages (most of what's interesting about it is fairly subtle and maybe illegible to non-APL people, but it's worth reading through if you're interested in that kind of thing): https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

very interesting even though it’s only partially legible to me!

Wow, that looks really interesting. It's good to see someone taking up the APL concept with a fresh look. That reminds me of a recent Twitter conversation about the dominance of text and XML/JSON-like data formats. My point was that they correspond to well-proven information structures from the pre-digital age, meaning centuries of experience. That's true for tables/matrices as well, and that is what APL builds on, adding the generalization to more than two dimensions. So... are there other pre-digital information structures that have proven useful and should have a fundamental place in the digital world?

@Konrad Hinsen Many of them are visual (drawings, illuminated manuscripts, &c). No wonder so many would try for visual programming interfaces. 🙂

Good point, though manipulating visual data does not necessarily require visual programming. I'd be happy already if we had standard digital representations for diagrams and other drawings, at a higher abstraction level than image or vector graphics files, and with good support on all platforms and major programming languages.

Agreed! In the context of drawing data visualizations, you might be interested in this visualization grammar: https://vega.github.io/vega/about/research/ I've used it a good bit and mostly found it a reasonable specification format. If you want to play with it live, there a notebook here: https://observablehq.com/@vega/how-vega-works Or, if you're feeling emacs-y, you can check out the mode I made for interaction with Vega from a few languages languages, including elisp: https://github.com/applied-science/emacs-vega-view

I'm a big APL fan an BQN is a fun iteration in the family. The character set has taken some getting used to, but the documentation is surprisingly good.

@Jack Rusher I had heard of Vega before, I'll finally have a closer look at it. Thanks for the pointers!