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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

“Expressive” = like two cats fought while standing on the keyboard

I've been messing with Uiua (https://www.uiua.org/) a good amount recently, and find its sort of dance between having a stack and being an array language somehow gets you to a nice level of legibility despite being a combo of two styles that tend to generate line noise.

Thanks for the link, it looks like a fascinating language

The front page there has examples like “÷3/+∿⊞×⊟×1.5.220×τ÷⟜⇡&asr” - is that closer to noise, or does it actually look more readable than K once you get used to both? I’m kind-of intrigued by the built-in multimedia output, but still this language looks scary and impractical at first glance. How does it compare to using numpy & jupyter? Do a lot of people prefer the extreme tenseness over using typeable keywords? I’m curious why it lets you type the readable operators but wants to turn them into glyphs; wouldn’t it be more approachable, more readable, and make more maintainable code, if it just used the keywords instead of glyphs?

Well firstly you can just type keywords and they get swapped by glyphs

Secondly, the power with Uiua is you can easily split up that expression literally by just hitting enter in some spots (and line swapping but…). You can give names

And finally if you are constantly doing operations across arrays it can be more legible to go a symbol like approach, like how most people prefer x+y to add x y. The conciseness helps you build up larger expressions before you need to break things up.

Cool language. I happened to notice the ⍜ operator, which operates on a transformed array, then reverts the transformation. Not sure if other array languages include this, but it's a really cool idea. I always found the traditional map/filter operators to be limiting in this regard, kind of like trying to write expressions without using parentheses.

It's in several, particularly newer APL dialects; see https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Under#History . Proud to say I originated the "structural" form used by Uiua, which is able to deal with transformations like filtering that lose parts of the input. Every language now seems to have its own take on what exactly Under means, with different implementations leading to different supported functions and various ways to relax the theory to be more convenient or handle intuitively expected things better.

Under is a concept in array languages, though it’s supported in a very adhoc way

I work with it daily in a bank, and I couldnt find a better way to express it. Many colleagues throwing their keyboard in despair at this stupid impossible to remember syntax.

There are a lot of things in various programming languages which are hard to remember, but k and array languages have such a small surface area, not being able to remember it while working with it daily amounts to learned helplessness.

(source: mostly amateur k programmer, also worked with it in a bank, find it vastly easier to read/write/remember than most mainstream languages)

Not that it's impossible to remember, bit it's definitely contrary to most traditional use of the symbols employed in it, though not without logic. My favorite is the functions from io package, called 0, 1, and 2 (yes, numbers) which handle interaction with stdin, stdout, and stderr respectively. In dyadic form they at least have a colon, but in monadic form they look like plain numbers: 1 "Hello world".

I suspect that to study k (and use kdb) efficiently, you need to actively forget what you knew about the syntax of other languages, and study k as a language from Mars that happens to map to ASCII characters somehow.

It is really easy to remember; it is so small that remembering is the least of the issue. The rest is just using it a lot; I find it readable and nice to work with. Unlike other some other languages we get shoved down your throats.

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