b-decoded VS ngn-k-tutorial

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

Complain about the language or documentation, but array language communities are absolutely friendly to outsiders! This tutorial lists some active forums, give them a try:

https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial/tree/main?tab=rea...

Also, have to shout out the APL Orchard, where Adám will give any visitor a personal tutorial: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/52405/the-apl-orchard

To add to the list, this one is pretty good;

https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial

If you like APL, then you probably want to try K, which is an ASCII-only array language with a focus on guided minimalism. For an open source K you can try ngn/k, which has a tutorial.

Razetime's matmul refactoring is brilliant: https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial/blob/main/c-think...

Finally, some nice examples of k's concision:

  qs:{$[2>#?x;x;,/qs'x@&'~\:x<*1?x]}    / Quicksort