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by gobdovan4 hours ago |
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upvoteby tosh3 hours ago|
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> Turns out most of the time it's more like a puzzle to get an (often inefficient) terse implementation by torturing some linear algebra operators.

solutions in APL can be very efficient if they are written in a machine sympathetic way

or in cases where the interpreter can map them onto one

for the curious:

https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6no6N3i9Tg (The Interpretive Advantage)

https://ummaycoc.github.io/wc.apl/ (Beating C with Dyalog APL: wc)

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upvoteby gobdovan14 minutes ago|
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Thanks for the response. I'd interpret it as a valid technical caveat, but it feels somewhat orthogonal to what I was pointing out.

You focus on the 'often inefficient' parenthetical, yet, to me, your response highlights the puzzle nature of the thinking APL encourages. If anything, it shifts the question from 'how do I express this tersely' to a still narrower 'how do I express this tersely in a way the interpreter can also optimize'.

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upvoteby blowscum3 hours ago|
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> At some point you get what APL is all about, and you can move on with life without too many regrets.

Honestly this is how computers/software/programming feel in general these days and it’s ruined it all for me.

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upvoteby chillpenguin3 hours ago|
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I basically feel the same way. In a way it is very liberating. All of those esoteric languages that were on my ever-growing todo list are now things I can let go of. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves how we want to spend our time, and now it is much harder to justify spending countless hours studying one programming language after another. We still can, of course, but we are now more "free" to do other things instead.

It's sort of sad, but really I think it is a weight off my shoulders.

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upvoteby adamgordonbell4 hours ago|
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BQN exists and needs more attention I think. It has some modern affordances as well.

https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/quick.html

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upvoteby floxy4 hours ago|
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https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html ?
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upvoteby gobdovan4 hours ago|
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Yes! I put together some explanation and TLA+ related resources in this comment, the website is one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48075169
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