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 aston on Friday May 04, 2007 @06:50PM (#19584)

When did we decide your code was cooler relative to someone else's when you end up typing fewer characters per line for the same functionality? If anything, the added density per line makes reading code (yours or, worse, someone else's) more difficult.

Maybe I'm missing something.

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Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by byrneseyeview on Friday May 04, 2007 @07:01PM (#19591)

Succinctness is power: notation should contain as much information per character as possible, so we can be programmers instead of typists.

Would that be easier to read if I added (superfluous) words?

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Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by aston on Friday May 04, 2007 @07:46PM (#19602)

I nticd ur nt tping lk ths. Sentences are much easier to understand if you use words, even if the abbreviated forms can be parsed out to the same meaning.

If your aim is to save yourself a couple characters per line, fine. But it does come at a cost.

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Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by SwellJoe on Saturday May 05, 2007 @02:05AM (#19700)

The interesting thing for me is that the K programs are fewer lines...a lot fewer. 9 in K vs. 96 in Perl in one example. When one remembers that perl is historically the king of one-liners, this is pretty impressive. I'd probably be willing to learn how to interpret line noise if I only have to parse 9 lines for every 96 I'm parsing now (I'm primarily a Perl programmer). I, obviously, don't believe this is representative--a large number of programming tasks aren't reduce-able beyond a certain level. But for a 50% LoC reduction, I might consider it.

There's a lot of other considerations, and right now Haskell and Erlang are leading my "what'll my next back end projects use" list (after Perl 6...which I'm getting excited about after seeing Audrey Tang's talk about it from a few days ago, as it appears it will fix every single major problem with Perl, by my reckoning)...but I'm not going to rule out a language merely because my first glance at it makes me uncomfortable or confused (if that were the case, I would have never used Perl, Python, Ruby, and I would be avoiding messing with Erlang and Haskell...I might have even continued trying to figure out Java, since it seemed comfortably familiar based on my C experience, but I believe that would have been a very bad instinct).

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Re:10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language... by ralph on Saturday May 05, 2007 @06:05AM (#19728)

I'd probably be willing to learn how to interpret line noise if I only have to parse 9 lines for every 96 I'm parsing now

bzip2 -9 <hellow.c | uuencode hellow.c.bz2

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