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So the summary of that long post: we still need group but Shakti/k9 gets rid of it because it's too slow forcing the user to diy it with other primitives as needed?

I love it... It's the exact opposite of every other language design. Others: lets ship it with every tool a developer might ask for. K9: Occam's razor to everything. Nothing is safe.

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there's a number of visionaries for lack of better term who have been following similar paths in their respective schools. chuck moore after FORTH got standardized went back to drawing board and made colorForth, where he reduced the number of available words to bare essential, very similar to how Arthur is rethinking and removing elements of apl in K, and then K in Shakti to what he sees as bare essentials. but you have less extreme cases, like Wirth developing pascal, then more capable modula, but then removing even arguable useful parts of modula in oberon, for being non-essential. I'm pretty sure there are other examples, but they like the examples I have given have small dedicated followings, rather than wide industry adoption, for reasons that wide industry adopted technologies tend to be all things for all people as a direct cause and effect of the wide adoption.

I think we need some kind of grouping function, but it doesn't have to be the 'generate group indices' function. I'm sure we'll have alternatives available such as `update ... by`.

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