A Java programmer unfamiliar with Haskell looks at a Haskell program and shouts, "I can't make even the slightest bit of sense out of this!"
A Haskell programmer unfamiliar with APL looks at an APL program and...
Most Haskell programmers should be familiar with right-to-left point-free style, and should be able to infer that symbols stand in for names.
Of course, understanding the individual symbols is a different matter, but hardly requiring a conceptual leap.
>A Haskell programmer unfamiliar with APL looks at an APL program and...
And says "what's the big deal?". That's exactly the question, what is the big deal. APL isn't scary, I'm not shouting "I can't make sense of this", I am asking "how is this better than haskell in the same way haskell is better than java?".
I'm not really interested in debating the reaction of an imagined Haskell programmer. I was just restating what the grandparent's analogy meant.
Your question is fine, but not what he meant by the analogy.
I'm not imagined, I am real. I know you were restating the analogy, the problem is that the analogy is wrong. I can't find anything about APL that a haskell developer would find new or interesting or frightening or anything like that.
Ok.
Re:The Future of Programming
by GeneralMayhem on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:51PM
(#6138363)
More esoteric organization/concepts for anyone coming from the C family (which is basically everyone), more out-there notation, more deserving of the title "write-only," and less ability to do anything you might want to do with a real computer beyond using it as a calculator. I wouldn't want to do much work with Haskell's GTK bindings, but at least they exist.
Can you elaborate on this? As I understand, the core strengths of APL are succinct notation, built-in verbs which operate on vectors/matrices, and a requirement to program in a point-free style. All of this can be done in Haskell.