[HN Gopher] F (2006)
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       F (2006)
        
       Author : hwayne
       Score  : 123 points
       Date   : 2024-06-19 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nsl.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nsl.com)
        
       | Duanemclemore wrote:
       | Stevan Apter is awesome, I love "No Stinking Loops." His episode
       | of the ArrayCast is great.
       | 
       | https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode26-stevan-apter
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related. Others?
       | 
       |  _F (2006)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238846 - Aug
       | 2020 (56 comments)
       | 
       |  _F - a pure functional concatenative language (2006)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10776314 - Dec 2015 (7
       | comments)
        
       | declan_roberts wrote:
       | > All primitives are denoted by single symbols
       | 
       | Take an axe to the troubleshoot-ability of your language with
       | this one weird trick that makes it impossible to google.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | Hello from APL! (And also Haskell, to a smaller extent.)
         | 
         | I bet all these languages come from people with a thick CS
         | theory background, and thus a tradition and a need to write
         | formulae on a blackboard.
         | 
         | Unlike a keyboard, a blackboard is a graphical device, it's
         | slow to produce long character strings, but basically any one
         | glyph takes about the same time to write, be it an x, [?], [?],
         | [?], , etc.
         | 
         | Then you want to plainly represent the same concepts in the
         | computer language, et voila.
        
           | pphysch wrote:
           | Yes, blackboard-simple is not the same as keyboard-simple.
           | Unless the language is specifically for code-golfing, such
           | design choices suggest the creators haven't thought very
           | holistically about their product.
        
             | nine_k wrote:
             | They likely wanted something out, and wanted something to
             | write a number of papers about. Unifying the computer
             | language syntax and the familiar CS theory syntax may be a
             | shrewd product decision, if, again, producing papers and
             | obtaining doctorates is the goal, while industry acceptance
             | is a distant secondary consideration.
        
             | g15jv2dp wrote:
             | Or... it's a conscious design choice that you happen to
             | disagree with. Just because you can think of one
             | disadvantage of the approach, doesn't mean that the
             | creators are idiot who didn't think about what they were
             | doing.
        
             | mlochbaum wrote:
             | (I think we got off the rails a bit: the linked article
             | looks to be ASCII-only! But I feel the need to defend
             | myself...)
             | 
             | This is a bit of a change-up from the usual "write-only
             | language" complaint! But it does have the benefit of
             | accuracy: yes, if you know the language, the time savings
             | in writing APL are smaller than the savings in reading it.
             | Both are faster, once you've spent a week or two with the
             | keyboard, since even the slow method of typing a prefix
             | character followed by a letter is faster than typing out a
             | keyword in another language.
             | 
             | Array languages are rarely "product"s. While I do offer it
             | to others for free, I make the language I want to use, and
             | having nice-to-read symbols for a one-time tooling cost is
             | a nice convenience for me. Don't call me thoughtless for
             | having different tradeoffs than you!
        
           | thewakalix wrote:
           | For Haskell, there's always Hoogle
           | (https://hoogle.haskell.org).
        
         | mlochbaum wrote:
         | I tried using search engines to find whether the fold function
         | in Joy, a vastly better-known language, takes an initial
         | element or not. Best I got, after some fiddling with search
         | terms, was a Joy tutorial that did have an example of fold.
         | Certainly much slower than using language documentation. Yes,
         | this choice will prevent F from being the next Elixir or
         | Kotlin, but it's hardly relevant to the usability of a niche
         | language like this.
        
       | encom wrote:
       | This is the opposite of click bait.
        
       | mrgoldenbrown wrote:
       | Unrelated to F# (Microsoft's functional .net language) as far as
       | I can tell.
        
       | ithkuil wrote:
       | Also interesting: https://www.uiua.org/
       | 
       | Concateniative APL-like (with Unicode symbols but with pragmatic
       | input method)
        
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