[aasasd]

Now that I feel the bite from my sedentary lifestyle on my bum, I'm more and more attracted by the idea of a language taking 1/10th the typing compared to what's typical today. However, afaict languages following APL's suit specialize in math, so I wonder if the approach could be adapted to more general kind of coding.

Even though the set of short symbols has to be limited, don't we currently have a few dozen often-repeated operations in language keywords and standard libraries? (Especially in the approach of e.g. Clojure, relying heavily on combining standard transformations on strictures.)

[geocar]

> However, afaict languages following APL's suit specialize in math, so I wonder if the approach could be adapted to more general kind of coding.

I use k/q regularly, and I'm not using it for "math".

The compact notation creates value in helping you make correct programs. See [1] and [2] specifically.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476294

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476702

You can write C in a dense style as well. And I do. When I do this, I can see opportunities for reuse that I cannot see if I spread my C program across multiple pages and multiple files. Here is the bulk of my webserver[3] that will beat the pants off of any other webserver -- substantially faster than nodejs or kdb's own webserver[4], and probably nginx or anything else you've got. (PS: If you think you know of a faster one, I'd like to know about it).

I am telling you I can only do this because the code is small.

[3]: https://github.com/geocar/dash/blob/master/d.c#L63

[4]: https://github.com/geocar/dash#performance

[aasasd]

Node.js is not the thing to compare C web servers performance to. Like, it's so much not the thing, it goes beyond funny and wraps around to sad.

Let me refer you to the TechEmpower framework benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...

Look at the language column there, you'll be surprised.

[geocar]

Here's fasthttp running on my machine (best of three):

    $ wrk -t2 -c90 -d9s http://localhost:8080/plaintext
    Running 9s test @ http://localhost:8080/plaintext
      2 threads and 90 connections
      Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
        Latency   831.78us  364.48us   7.56ms   70.19%
        Req/Sec    40.55k     3.31k   48.04k    74.44%
      726417 requests in 9.01s, 87.98MB read
    Requests/sec:  80603.64
    Transfer/sec:      9.76MB

which I got by checking out https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks.git, disabling the mysql connection, and running frameworks/Go/fasthttp's ./server-mysql (which is what the benchmark script seems to do). I thought this would be easier than getting dash running the TechEmpower results.

and here's dash running with the kdb networking disabled (best of three):

    $ wrk -t2 -c90 -d3s 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/?f=204&k=hi&v=1'
    Running 3s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8080/?f=204&k=hi&v=1
      2 threads and 90 connections
      Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
        Latency   787.72us  213.62us   3.49ms   71.85%
        Req/Sec    44.82k     3.04k   60.44k    83.61%
      271946 requests in 3.10s, 16.08MB read
    Requests/sec:  87671.23
    Transfer/sec:      5.18MB

My laptop isn't a beefy "Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE" -- this is just a loopback test, but it's already disinclined me to spend any more time on it; Fasthttp definitely is impressive how close it gets, but dash is still faster.

And comparing a 100 line C program to hundreds or thousands of lines of go or C or Java is a bit pointless. If the 100 lines of C doesn't do what you want, I'll throw it away and write a different 100 lines. That's what brief programs get you.

NB: I would have tried ulib but it wouldn't even build on my laptop.

[mycall]

If you rewrote [3] to use cleaner variable naming, perhaps the readability would improve?

[pmoriarty]

I personally question the utility of such terseness, and much prefer the verbosity of the Lisp family of languages, where cultural norms make for function names like "number-to-string" and "expand-file-name", rather than the norms I've seen in languages like APL, K, J, Q, OCaml, and Haskell, which seem to love more mathematically-inspired single-letter names like "n" or "k", and various operators in a similar vein.

The Lisp-like way of programming is more appealing to me because it makes the programs very easy to read. You can mostly get a sense of what they're doing just by reading them like ordinary English. I've found this especially useful when I'm trying to understand code I'm not already familiar with, or when looking at my own code months or years from when I wrote it, and it's especially important these days when polyglot programming is commonplace -- I don't need to remember nearly as much of how to do something in Lisp because it's so easy and straightforward and doesn't have the overhead of remembering a whole bunch of specialized syntax.

Contrast this with the terser, more mathematically-inclined languages, where specialized syntax and single-character names are widely used. These tend to be more write-only languages for me, where I have to be constantly steeped in the language in order to make understanding it relatively natural, and if I go away from them for a while, it takes quite a bit of effort to get back in to them enough to make sense of what was written, and reading other people's code is much more of a chore than it is for me in Lisp.

In the old days, or perhaps on embedded systems these days, when one had to closely watch the byte count of one's program lest it not fit in to memory, perhaps such terseness was useful. But these days, I'm not yet convinced of its utility outside of a mathematical context, where the mapping of such terse names and operations is more natural.

For me clarity trumps terseness.

[geocar]

For me, terseness is necessary for correctness.

I don't just do this with APLish languages; I do this with C (and lisp, and PHP, and others...)

I've only ever written short programs correctly: If they can fit on a page, I can just look and see whatever bug I might be experiencing.

If someone wants to change my software, it's because they want it to do something that I don't want it to do. They will find value in the fact it is short: That there isn't very much to read. Admittedly, a programmer unexperienced in this method may have some anxieties about it, but given how valuable correctness is, I'd prefer to cause a bit of anxiety in beginners than make programs that need beginners to fix them.

[rossjudson]

The notation can yield very dense programs. Significant systems have been written that can be expressed on a screen or two of code (search Arthur Whitney APL for "the legends").

When we learn to read, we learn to "sight read" words. APL/J/K constructs can be "sight read" as well.

[pmoriarty]

Sight-reading is a great analogy because as with music, in order to stay fluent and make one's performance (or sight-reading) easy, one has to stay in constant practice.

I'd argue that much less of this is required for languages like Lisp, unless, of course, you step away from practicing reading English, in which case maybe the very English-like programs of Lisp will start to seem foreign to you.

[vmchale]

I think you're just bad at reading pointfree notation, tbh, which is not a particularly interesting commentary on OCaml or Haskell.

Lots of things lend themselves well to pointfree style, and if you do not see them it is because of your own horizons.

You can write OCaml/Haskell with names like doesFileExist when you need to.

[pmoriarty]

"You can write OCaml/Haskell with names like doesFileExist when you need to."

You can, but it's rarely done in practice. This is a cultural issue more than a language issue. OCaml/Haskell programmers just seem to prefer much shorter, more math-like names than Lisp programmers do.

For me this makes a huge difference when reading through code written by the community. Lisp is just much more immediately understandable than OCaml/Haskell and related languages.

Yes, this is probably my own limitation, and I'd probably be a lot better at it given enough practice. But I just don't need that much practice to understand Lisp, and I can go away from it and come back to it much later without needing a significant refresher in the language either.

[paradoxparalax]

Interestingly, I noted I tended to use one letter variables when writing in Ruby, and the longest, most descriptive possible variable's names when writing in C#; And Ruby, I think I have read somewhere, is somewhat close to lisp. There is the readability of the language itself to weight in too, when its easy to see the important stuff, you can name the important stuff with short names. And there is the most important, what are you writing about; Strangely I always remember to myself that the only important goal is to write the slowest, most natural language, and above all, most natural/daily-life/ELI5 Logic. But always end with the logic looking like pure math notation, like if I looked at it not knowing it was me who wrote, would think is unreadable Dark Magic Math, and I end with it having zero Math or CS formal training (only highschool), so maybe it's inescapable.

[Avshalom]

APL is actually kind of bad at math, or well the kind of math people tend to think of when they talk about matlab or Fortran being good at math.

What APL does well is filter/select/transform more spreadsheet style work than linear algebra stuff. It's a language to describe computation as meant by the sort of computer scientists that were born when computer was a job description.

[aasasd]

Still, from what I gathered, APL is primarily suited for chewing through a bunch of numbers lumped into arrays, in the manner of shaders or DSP, while I haven't seen examples with traditional control flow (and Perlis notes that loops and branches aren't APL's thing)―though I didn't look for long.

Come to think of it, that's similar to what's often done to lists in Lisp, outside of the more traditional control flow of 'business logic.' Precisely the filter-select-transform.

[avmich]

APL has map embedded into language. And reduce is an operator in J. APL is conveniently used by those who don't describe themselves as programmers - let alone as computer scientists - but need to get the job done. In this aspect it's similar to Excel, I think.

I wonder if APL is that much different from Matlab by the concept.

[4thaccount]

Syntactically, Matlab is closer to traditional languages. Where it excels at math is that you can do all sorts of things like solving matrices automatically. APL can invert small matrices, but can't automatically find the best way to solve it like Matlab will do. APL has great mathematical notation, but is missing the math libraries you typically need to do real math work (optimization solvers) which Matlab has via toolboxes and Mathematica has builtin.

[vmchale]

FORTRAN is a great language, but it's not really good at math either. It's used with floats, which are a peculiar and volatile beast, though certainly useful. When I think of "good at math" I think of something like Egison.

[4thaccount]

Most high performance computing was done with Fortran back in the day (and still used today) because working with arrays and matrices is done at a higher level than C/C++ or Assembly, but it is still a fast language and has easy access to BLAS/LAPACK. When I think of scientific computing, I think of Fortran, Matlab, Mathematica, C, C++, Python + Numpy, and recently Julia. APL could've been great here if the vendors had included low level code to do all the numeric work and used APL as the glue language, but it didn't happen that way and became popular in the finance world instead. It's a shame.

[arcfide]

You may want to check out the Co-dfns compiler, which is proof positive that APL is a terrific language for doing things like tree manipulations, which is the traditional domain of Lisp and functional programming languages like Haskell.

https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13638086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797797

[rbanffy]

I hear of APL being used in high-frequency trading and other financial spaces. It's not only because of the language's expressive power, but because the whole runtime fits well within the CPU's instruction cache and, therefore, your program will be ridiculously fast.