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by boje 44 days ago
Now that I think about it, and I don't know if this exists yet, but APL would probably very much benefit from having a Scratch-like or Factorio-like visual editor paired with a touch interface. You would drag and drop symbols, and long-pressing a symbol would popup its definition.

You could also probably do nice things with the symbol "icon blocks" themselves, and provide them with colors or different visualizations to convey different contextual meanings.

2 comments

That wouldn't help much. People who don't use these languages doesn't understand that what makes the language different isn't the syntax. There are plenty of dialects that use English words instead of symbols (check out Ivy by Ron Pike for example).

The difference is much deeper, but the best way to understand it is probably to check out an introduction (there is a lot on youtube).

I'd personally be happy to give an introduction to anyone willing to listen, but this comment field is not the place to do it.

Excel, visual "programming" lo/no code environments, and Factorio itself are all examples of this fallacy: making it easier to build complex symbolic systems doesn't help people learn how to manage that complexity; it in fact enables them to produce overtly complex systems that become hard to extend, to maintain and to debug.

That is precisely the source of my skepticism regarding the use of LLMs to code. What benefits most programmers, teams and organizations in building and manage complex systems is discipline. Disciplined work produces systems that are relatively easy to represent and reason about, and the shallow lesson people take is that easy representation is a silver bullet.

People keep falling for that trap over and over again. Understanding it deeply can provide lots of great opportunity for interesting work though.

Not APL, but an array language https://www.uiua.org/
Yes, this! Weird notation solved with essentially written word autocomplete!

It naturally trains your memory as you use it. Definitely a language of choice for getting into array languages in my opinion.