alt Hacker NewsDo APL programmers think this is a good thing? It sounds a lot like how I feel about currying in language that have it (meaning it's terrible because code can't be reasoned about locally, only with a ton of surrounding context, the entire program in the worst case)
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It makes parsing tricky. But for the programmer it’s rarely an issue, as typically definitions are physically close. Some variants like BQN avoids this ambiguity by imposing a naming scheme (function names upper case, array names lower case or similar).
I am not good enough with APL to be certain but I think you can generally avoid most of these sorts of ambiguities and the terseness of APL helps a great deal because the required context is never far away, generally don't even have to scroll. I have been following this thread to see what the more experienced have to say, decided to force the issue.
Huh? Currying doesn't require any nonlocal reasoning. It's just the convention of preferring functions of type a -> (b -> c) to functions of type (a, b) -> c. (Most programming languages use the latter.)
It gets me thinking about the “high context / low context” distinction in natural languages. High context languages are one where the meaning of a symbol depends on the context in which it’s embedded.
It’s a continuum, so English is typically considered low context but it does have some examples. “Free as in freedom versus free as in beer,” is one that immediately comes to mind.
À high context language would be one like Chinese where, for example, the character 过 can be a grammatical marker for experiential aspect, a preposition equivalent to “over” “across” or “through” depending on context, a verb with more English equivalents than I care to try and enumerate, an affix similar to “super-“, etc.
When I was first starting to learn Chinese it seemed like this would be hopelessly confusing. But it turns out that human brains are incredibly well adapted to this sort of disambiguation task. So now that I’ve got some time using the language behind me it’s so automatic that I’m not really even aware of it anymore, except to sit here racking my brain for examples like this for the purpose of relating an anecdote.
I would bet that it’s a similar story for APL: initially seems weird if you aren’t used to it, but not actually a problem in practice.