I vibecoded https://punkx.org/apl/learn.html [1] its good slow entry into gnu-apl, at least it got me to be able to make tictactoe, vibecoded or not, it helped me to start.
I am amazed how quickly APL changed the way I think.
Also strongly recommend watching Aaron Hsu on youtube.
There is no better time to re-learn programming, try APL, Forth, LISP, z80 machine code, UXN TAL, just try new things.
"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."
APL is cool, but that quote hurts my brain. Disregard the funny typo, clearly different situations call for different strategies. For example, it might be great to use LLM slop interactively while learning, but that doesn’t mean it can be used as a finished product.
FYI, your "8‿64 •bit._cast -⟜@ raw" in bqn/util.bqn results in passing to •bit._cast integers in the range 0..255, whereas it expects integers ¯128..127 (and does arbitrary platform-specific things on integers outside that for the int16→int8 narrow); removing the "-⟜@" makes it work properly, and 2.5-5x faster while at it from not going to intermediate int16 (allowing the bitcast to be O(1) by itself). (•FBytes → •file.MapBytes also probably improves things, at the cost of the obvious mmap problem of issues if the file changes, as BQNs arrays are immutable). This is also what caused the problem at https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/939/changes/40... (there's been some discussion about what to do about invalid •bit._cast before, considering it's rather perf-sensitive; it's the only place in CBQN with such quiet very-wrong results on invalid inputs)
The default CBQN "make o3" on x86-64 also results in it only using SSE2 (utilizing function multiversioning is on the ever-infinite TODO list, though somewhat-low on it considering it's strictly-unnecessary in any specific situation; there's also AVX-512 usage on a branch, but mostly only AVX2 on mainline; and no arm SVE)
That all said, CBQN doesn't currently do any loop fusion, so being significantly-slower for sequences of operations over larger-than-cache arrays would kinda just be expected. BQN also just isn't particularly intended for database work anyway.
(didn't look much at the specific query impls, though "Pair" in utils.bqn is at least an overlong version of "Pair ← ⋈¨"; and some if not all of those Pairs would be better as "≍˘" to avoid nested arrays and ensuing pointer chasing; and, of course, if some of the columns are bools/int8/int16/int32, it'd be beneficial to store & load them as such instead of float64)
BQN & CBQN are absolutely wonderful pieces of code.
L is mac/lin but linux is avx512 only specifically to try to deal with that problem. The compute on compressed algos helps fit more in those cache lines! https://lv1.sh/blog/compute-on-compressed/
I agree 100%! If anything, I would encourage the site owner to increase the font size on that message. There is no shame to be vibecoding simple websites in 2026. IMHO: It takes away nothing from project. Also, I really like the second part: "Runtime by hand." That's cool in 2026 in the era of AI slop.
What's the problem if a site is vibecoded? We will be seeing it more often, I recon. Let's get used to it. On the other hand, perhaps a disclaimer is in order.
Unknown quality is the absence of information, you can’t have a signal for it.
If you are using “unknown” as a euphemism for “poor”, which is the most obvious thing that makes the signal meaningful in the direction that seems apparent from context, why?.
Phrased differently, they claimed that the entropy of the distribution of some quality metric tends to be higher on the domain of projects with vibecoded sites compared to the domain of projects with handcrafted sites.
I explicitly do not mean "poor," that's why I choose "unknown." A better word would have been "variable." The point I intend to convey is that you need to use other signals to judge.
That's also why "closed-source" was mentioned in the same sentence. Two missing signals.
That's also why the author keeps pointing to the benchmarks and test suite, which is the signal they'd like us to judge by. Seems entirely reasonable to me!
Typically if a site is well designed, that used to be a signal that a lot of resources had been invested into the project. Now that signal is rather noisy.
Here, is particularly bad, as the main page is just complete slop bullet points. What does 'end-to-end column compression' mean? or 'uniform bytes at every layer'?
It's difficult to understand at a glance now, if this project is going to be abandonware in a week or if someone actually spending time on this. If the creator can't be bothered to read it, why should I?
Personally, I'm also very weary of Claude design-isms. Once you learn them, you see them everywhere.
fair point. I am not a front end designer and I did want something less spartan than proverbial q.txt [1] .
To be honest - many folks in the community have had access for some time , and a website was just put up this week as a 'larger community access'.
That said the mail group has more details and the blog posts are effectively internal posts turned into shorter (less code) versions. The binary itself is years of effort - with small improvements over many years and shaving a few kb each time ... 'built the old way' like amish furniture :)
Look online for Kx systems history of IP enforcement and legal threats. They are well known in the quant community for essentially being the Disney of time series databases. Nice tech yes, but the people behind it hold values that are typically diametrically opposite of hacker ethos. Good riddance.
I am amazed how quickly APL changed the way I think.
Also strongly recommend watching Aaron Hsu on youtube.
There is no better time to re-learn programming, try APL, Forth, LISP, z80 machine code, UXN TAL, just try new things.
"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."
[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/gnu-apl-wasm source of the repl and learn playground and also how to compile gnu apl to wasm (vibecoded)