alt Hacker News> more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications.
I have the same feeling. The root of K is APL, but to avoid special characters (I assume), the same symbol has multiple meanings (overloaded), depending on eg. the position, the data type, and the context. The idea is that "programs should be short enough to fit in your head." The challenge is, similar to Perl and Regex syntax, it's very hard and often cryptic to read.
I do think a concise syntax is useful, for a programming language. But at the same time, the syntax should be readable, and that probably means that each symbol or operator must only have one meaning, and that meaning should be (more or less) obvious.
K is an array language. Even an integer is actually an array of one element. I think that makes sense for a tiny language: This is the simplest possible type system. You can even support strings, when using eg. metadata or using a heuristic like "a string is always zero terminated" (which is what I used for my tiny language).
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wasnt there another post about using these eso lang as intelligence tests for AI?
Reading that certainly requires more than symbol shunting.
It's clear that the symbols want to have one meaning each, for monadic and dyadic use, but that might mean quite different execution and types.
For example, & is monadic 'where' and dyadic 'min' (a logical extension of it being AND on bit-booleans), but this means you get different semantics, even if they all capture the 'where'-ness:
In both cases, you get that `x@&x` works, as `&x` will yield appropriate indices for `x`, but what that actually does has changed. In other languages, these would be spelled very differently, and so do seem like an overload, but sometimes it is just a point of view.As for why it's obvious- it's not, really, but it's no less obvious than the word `where`, and you have already learnt it, as it is (as it seems to me at least) to be punned on the C syntax (same as `*`, which gives `first`).