[HN Gopher] The Jame of Life
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       The Jame of Life
        
       Author : gbrown_
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2021-05-21 09:25 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (buttondown.email)
 (TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.email)
        
       | inimino wrote:
       | This is an interesting post, but I think it should have mentioned
       | the point that GoL is a tour-de-force to show off what is
       | possible in the language, but it's not what the language is
       | mostly used for. Most people using J or APL will just be getting
       | some statistics out of large tables of numbers, or simulating
       | something. So it's a little unfair to criticize the language for
       | not being well suited to the problem. It's an extreme example of
       | something well beyond what you would normally see written in that
       | style.
        
       | narrator wrote:
       | I worked translating APL into C. APL died for the same reasons
       | Perl died. Nobody wants to read your code. APL had the niche back
       | in the 70s that it was a very productive language for 110 baud
       | teletypes where you could watch the characters coming back from
       | the timesharing system print out line by line as you waited. In
       | that age, conciseness was a killer feature.
        
         | rscho wrote:
         | APL died? A large part of banking and heavy industry runs on
         | APL, so I don't think so...
        
           | donkarma wrote:
           | It's dead, just still decaying
        
       | tromp wrote:
       | Sometimes a simpler language beats one with problem specific
       | primitives. For instance, Haskell is well equipped to do a short
       | prime number generator with
       | 
       | nubBy(((>1).).gcd)[2..]
       | 
       | where nub removes duplicates from a list according to some notion
       | of equivalence, which in this case is having a greatest common
       | divisor greater than one.
       | 
       | That's just 23 bytes. Can we beat that with a language with no
       | such arithmetic and list support?
       | 
       | It can in fact be beaten with a language that has no built-in
       | numbers, let alone arithmetic.
       | 
       | This 167 bit Binary Lambda Calculus [1] program 00110101000101000
       | 10100010000010100000100010100010000010000010100000100010100000100
       | 010000010000000100 produces the infinite characteristic sequence
       | of primes.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://tromp.github.io/cl/Binary_lambda_calculus.html#Compl...
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-22 23:01 UTC)