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Comment by duchenne | Hacker News Reader

> +/!10

I personally find the given example harder to read than the equivalent in python/matlab/javascript with lodash/probably many other languages

sum(range(10))

sum(1:10)

With "K", you have to know a few new conventions. In the second case you just have to read, and the data flow is more obvious.

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You still need to know that range starts at 0 and the end is not inclusive. Also, the second example is not the same as the first one, unless the second is non-inclusive.

Yes, but as you multiply that difference 100 or 1000, the advantages of the concise notation become obvious.

This 100 or 1000x claim is extraordinary. Do you have any factual basis for repeatedly asserting it?

Contrived Debian shootout benchmarks:

http://www.kparc.com/z/comp.k

https://web.archive.org/web/http://shootout.alioth.debian.or...

Note that the relevant k program here is contained entirely on the last line of code and denoted by a comment telling you what it does:

http://www.kparc.com/z/fun.k

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WardNumberInManyProgrammingLangua...

Most Joy people are also k people, and Joy appears to be the only one similar, although still very large.

The C++ program is lost to link rot now, but by the author's own admission, was substantially larger than even the substantially large examples within that page.

      1    2   29 k
     23   70  498 scheme
     25  111  768 otherhaskell
     44  135 1096 erlang
     53  125 1043 rb
     67  190 1419 ocaml
     74  346 1693 haskell
     80  357 2586 java

Keep in mind that by their own admission, everyone in the c2 thread's code was hard to read (outside of the Joy program), and many were buggy. Meanwhile, the k program is quite simple to read.

These are just some basic examples, though.

You should probably label your columns, but that seems to be wc output.

The Scheme and Haskell versions are actually shorter than you imply since they include the pairings in the count (when the pairings in the code are examples). Additionally, the k version is one line longer than you suggest. The definition of a is on its own line is used in the solution. Still only 2 lines, but if you want to persuade you should probably have correct numbers.

Fair crit! Running off of few hours of sleep last night (spent way too long defending k in this thread; need to set sensible noprocrast settings or get some flavor of self-control); accuracy is impaired. Another error I see in retrospect is that I included comments in a few of them but not all of them.

So maybe 40x in line count if you compare an extremely verbose language like Java to K in this contrived example? That's not close to 100x and especially not close to 1000x.

I'm sorry, but which one are you looking at? (All comments stripped:)

k mandelbrot line count: 1

c++ mandelbrot line count: 148

Java line count: 157

Modern PL example (found on the modern shootout page, which I just found out they changed the link on):

Rust mandelbrot line count: 116

Ada mandelbrot line count: 532

And that's not even the one where k comes off the best.

As I understand author’s point, your example with “sum” is only valid because “sum” word has very few meanings, especially in software engineering world.

Even the word “product” would introduce certain ambiguity in context of real world codebase: is it “math” product or some “domain” product?

It’s even worse with most other words.

So if in any given codebase you still have to know the specific meaning of every word, how is it different from having to know specific meaning of every K symbol?

> “sum” word has very few meanings, especially in software engineering world

Sum types, checksums, …

That’s why I said “few”, not “one”?

I'm not sure that sum and product differ significantly, which is why I brought up a couple of examples.

> So if in any given codebase you still have to know the specific meaning of every word, how is it different from having to know specific meaning of every K symbol?

So you never encountered namespaces then? Because that's why you use namespaces. The number of symbols is limited, which is the reason why the whole "a symbol is more explicit"-argument simply doesn't hold in general. It breaks apart pretty quickly. That's why you'll find the following sentence pretty much verbatim in most maths and cs publications: "Throughout this paper, unless otherwise speciﬁed, we use the following notations," followed by half a page of definitions. Plot twist: different authors often use different notation even within the same field of research.

I didn’t say I buy that argument, it’s just my understanding of it.

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