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fluidcruft04/03/20251 replyview on HN

That's probably analogous to reading levels. So it would depend on the reading level of the intended audience. I haven't used C in almost a decade and I would have to refresh/confirm the precise orders of operations there. I do at least know that I need to refresh and after I look it up it should be fine until I forget it again. For people fluent in the language unlikely to be a big deal.

Conceivably, if there were an equivalent of "8th grade reading level" for C that forbade pointer arithmetic on the left hand side of an assignment (for example) it could be reformatted by an LLM fairly easily. Some for loop expressions would probably be significantly less elegant, though. But that seems better that converting it to English.

That might actually make a clever tooltip sort of thing--highlight a snippet of code and ask for a dumbed-down version in a popup or even an English translation to explain it. Would save me hitting the reference.

APL is another example of dense languages that (some) people like to work in. I personally have never had the time to learn it though.


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skydhash04/03/2025

> APL is another example of dense languages that (some) people like to work in.

I recently learn an array programming language called Uiua[0] and it was fun to solve problems in it (I used the advent of code's ones). Some tree operation was a bit of a pain, but you can get very concise code. And after a bit, you can recognize the symbols very easily (and the editor support was good in Emacs).

[0]: https://www.uiua.org/