| What an interesting and pleasing little language! I like the use of non-ASCII Unicode glyphs and symbols for some functions/commands. It makes me wonder why (since we now have rich graphical user interfaces as opposed to monochrome ASCII command-line dumb terminals that were prevalent in the mid-early history of computers) more languages don't support those. On a related note, I think it would be interesting to research computer languages which were developed in base languages that are not English, i.e., any computer languages originating out of India, Russia, China, Japan, etc. -- to name a few... Maybe there's such a thing as an Esperanto programming language... Getting back to symbols though, a future society might implement a purely symbol based programming language. Were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs -- a programming language for a computing architecture that has vanished in the depths of time? One can only speculate! We do know that in our current day there are programming languages like Mathematica, where Math symbols can be used in lieu of English(y) code, and there may be a trend to more symbols replacing ASCII named/spelled keywords and functions in our code in languages of the future... The use of symbols to replace words might result in smaller tighter, more readable code -- but (I'm thinking from the perspective of a future society here) it also might sever the bridge to computing's past... Which may be desirable to have, IF that future society would want to resurrect computers and compuation from a future apocalyptic event... But perhaps I'm thinking too hard about all of this... Interested parties may want to check out the following video: "Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg Or, fast forward to this point to see the 32 symbols: https://youtu.be/hJnEQCMA5Sg?t=403 Also, here is a great tutorial page for people who are new to stack-based languages: https://skilldrick.github.io/easyforth/ Anyway, Uiua looks very nice! |
Of course, as such things go, APL's appeal fell as the mainframe world settled on EBCDIC or ASCII (depending on if you were an IBM shop or not) as a "universal" character encoding and also as saving punch card space was less of a problem as other storage systems became more prominent.
Uiua seems a fun "emoji-native" take on "your grandmother's" APL. (BQN is generally cited as among the first "Unicode-native" in the APL family. Beyond the stack language changes as neither APL nor BQN are stack languages, Uiua swaps some niftier emoji-based choices for operators that feel fresher and less "ancient math hieroglyphics" and little bit more "texting your modern friend who in this case is a computer" hieroglyphics.)