New Kind of Paper, Part Two | Hacker News Reader

New Kind of Paper, Part Two

mlajtos.mu

6 pointsmlajtos7 comments

I'd love a pen-driven APL -- it's an astute observation that this goes back to Iverson's original vision.

Exactly! People tell me that Smalltalk should have a renaissance, but APL deserves it even more.

Previous post (part 1) on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937

Second post introduces Fluent, an APL/J/BQN/LPA-inspired programming language that is used for a computerized paper&pencil programming, a REPL for your pencil.

Aim of Fluent is to be extremely easy to read and write, i.e. LTR, only binary infix ops, no tacit, higher-order ops are fine, also optional right paren.

This looks really nice, and I'd love to try it. I am steadily becoming more convinced that there's room for an LTR APLish language.

Hello Adám, thank you for the LPA notes – they are still very inspirational and reassured me that LTR is worth exploring. If you found out something new, I would love to read it.

I am aiming private beta for the end of 09/2021. The language, runtime and interface are in a good shape, however the handwriting recognition have seen only my glyphs so far. Also segmentation algorithm is something to think about when writing. I have to solve these issues before private beta and I have only vague ideas about that right now.

Language-wise, I have to explore monadic operators [0], and type-dependent operators (or polymorphic operators?). They are really intriguing. [1] These facilities should be enough for the language, and then I have to fit operators into this paradigm. Even though pencil enable us to use every glyph, I try avoid unfamiliar/complicated ones. Polymorphic operators could really help here, as one operator could have multiple roles. However, I try to be vigilant because it could create bigger mess than monads/dyads.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/p21u7...

[1]: http://mlajtos.mu/posts/new-kind-of-paper-2#reduceRight

Amazing work on this!

I spotted a typo in your blog post. When you start talking about code on pizza boxes, you can read “Anyway, writing code by hand is very due for a serious experimentation.”, there's something missing between "very" and "due" :)

"much"? I'll fix it but I have to know what word I am missing. :D

Edit: I added "much".

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