b-decoded VS jsource

Just use b

I use b

I used to believe this but i don't anymore.

From https://github.com/tlack/b-decoded

Arthur is famous for his very dense programming style. Most C programmers would scream when seeing this code.

In his view (and others in the terse scene), it is much better to have everything in your application readable on the screen at once than to have great names for things or a lot of white space to comfort the first timer reader.

To them, once you've sufficiently studied that screen or two of code, you can understand all of it at the same time. If it's spread out over thousands of files, it's very difficult to understand all of it, which leads to bugs, unnecessary abstraction, and the need for advanced tooling just to work with your own project's code.

He wants to see the code "all at once" so he can understand all of its behavior without paging around and shifting his focus to another tab, window, etc. To get there he makes a lot of tradeoffs in terms of the code formatting and naming conventions. He also, in b, creates a dense set of interlocking macros and abstractions that can make the code very hard to follow.

Critics and the uninitiated say that his code is like old school modem line noise: random punctuation intermixed with bits of understandable code. I would suggest that he's actually quite careful with the abstractions he chooses and they are actually not always the most dense, highly compressed code structures available to him. He chooses wisely and his code rewards deep study.

Interview with Arthur Whitney: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242

Here's some links relating to this style of code that you may find useful:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W83ME5JecI2hd5hAUqQ1BVF3...

https://github.com/tlack/b-decoded

https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/90748/conversation/ngn-...

They're not 1.5 paragraphs per line, but enough to give a taste of the implementation style.

I could write a whole compiler in that time.

Here is a link: https://github.com/tlack/b-decoded

The one other example I know that morphs the language to that extent and to the detriment of readability by C programmers is the J interpreter[1,2]. But, once again, nobody (that I’ve read) claims it’s good or clear C. (Good C for those who speak J, maybe; I wouldn’t know.)

For a way to morph C syntax that does make things better, see libmill[3].

[1] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

[2] https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/tree/master/jsrc

[3] https://250bpm.com/blog:56/

Oh damn Whitney C representation.

I develop J btw

No, it was rhetorical, because it's obviously (to an APL-family programmer), not bad!

Your cultural prejudice is showing. There are good reasons APL is written the way it is, and this example is simply bringing those benefits to C by writing it in the dense APL style. There are other APL derivatives, like J[1] that are written the same way. These projects are well-maintained. They aren't collapsing under a load of technical debt. The style works. To them, it's clean code.

[1]: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

Recently, I wanted to write a simple piece of code in J, but immediately found a bug. I went ahead to fetch the source to see if I can fix it. But, hell no. I couldn't believe my eyes. Is this how someone programs, really? I just can't believe it didn't go through some kind of obfuscator.

Here are some samples, but almost anything in the repository is beyond me:

https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/jsrc/xo.c

You can view the code, but is not open source: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/license.txt

This is the same dense style used in J.

All-in-all this example doesn't seem too bad. It's clear what happens and is easy to follow. If you wan't to see something remarkably terribly, check out Whitney style. It's used in APL/J/K family interpreters. Keep in mind, financial institutions run that code.