kotlingrad VS uiua

and that there is a mature library for autodiff https://github.com/breandan/kotlingrad

I am really surprised that no-one mentioned https://www.uiua.org/ yet. If you like APL/BQN/K/L, look at Uiua! You're going to love it! It's very ergonomic, and has awesome and fun facilities for audio and video rendering!

For those who think this is a typo, uiua [1] (pronounced "wee-wuh") is a stack-based array programming language.

I solved a few problems last year, and it is amazing how compact the solutions are. It also messes with your head, and the community surrounding it is interesting. Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.uiua.org/

You should definitely check out uiua (https://www.uiua.org/)! Array programming can certainly be intimidating, but I think it's worth doing for a few reasons:

- The "array"-ish solution to a problem is usually a very data-oriented solution. Even if you aren't working in an array-oriented language (and just to be clear, I'm not advocating that people write production code in array languages), "thinking in arrays" helps me come up with more elegant solutions.

- Learning array programming is a little like learning to program all over again. If you really enjoyed the process of learning to program, it lights up those same brain circuits, which I found really enjoyable.

- If you ever want to do any graphics programming the mental model can be very helpful. Array programming really helped me wrap my mind around how shader programs are executed.

Uiua is little unique in that it is also a stack-based language, so learning both paradigms at the same time can definitely be a little challenging, but I think it's well worth it.

> APL is another example of dense languages that (some) people like to work in.

I recently learn an array programming language called Uiua[0] and it was fun to solve problems in it (I used the advent of code's ones). Some tree operation was a bit of a pain, but you can get very concise code. And after a bit, you can recognize the symbols very easily (and the editor support was good in Emacs).

[0]: https://www.uiua.org/

I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary chords.

There’s a decent VSCode plugin but I mostly use the online pad because it’s such a rich environment. Very active Discord, with an AoC channel for help and sharing solutions - the maintainer actively iterates on the language to help them solve AoC problems.

https://www.uiua.org/

(I also fall back to Clojure when I’m struggling to come up with a uiua solution or banging my head against the stack, I kinda wish I had uiua-in-Clojure like how April is APL-in-CL)