17 Nov
2021
17 Nov
'21
2:35 a.m.
On Nov 16, 2021, at 9:04 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be
inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become
fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions
make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large
code to opacity.
I enjoyed using APL in late ‘70s. And now I use and like k, another array
language. I am not fond of code golfing (fewest keystrokes win!) in these
languages but some problems are certainly easier to solve in them. It’s
like a workshop with a well thought out set of power tools. Similarly, a
lot of practice is necessary to use them effectively. When I get tired of
using grep, send, xargs in a shell pipeline I have wanted to write a shell
with similarly powerful builtin features….