10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language you've never heard of

Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by byrneseyeview on Friday May 04, 2007 @05:24PM (#19538)

http://www.bugbear.com/arc.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/indylangs.html

"The individual tokens should be short as well. Perl and Common Lisp occupy opposite poles on this question. Perl programs can be almost cryptically dense, while the names of built-in Common Lisp operators are comically long. The designers of Common Lisp probably expected users to have text editors that would type these long names for them. But the cost of a long name is not just the cost of typing it. There is also the cost of reading it, and the cost of the space it takes up on your screen."

I'd guess that if you want to be better at Arc than all the Arc-philes who know Lisp, K would be worth studying.

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Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by nostrademons on Friday May 04, 2007 @05:50PM (#19557)

Why would I want to be better at Arc than Lispniks? I'm a Haskeller. We're better than them anyways. ;-)

Seriously, this is one case where I think PG is wrong. Typing isn't the main productivity burden on programmers, thinking is. Any time you make someone decipher an identifier, you're slowing them down. Unpronounceable functions are particularly bad: I dunno about others, but I always think "F-N" when I see "fn", while I think "def" when I see "def".

I think Python and Scheme have it basically right, Haskell is okay but has an unfortunate tendency towards obscure vocabulary and cryptic conventions (nub? foldl? mapM_?), and Common Lisp and Java are way too verbose.

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