ivy VS selectrum

My recent exposure to array programming languages came via a podcast called The Array Cast[1]

Not affiliated, just recommending. The regular co-hosts appear to each be experienced with various array languages such as J, APL, etc. They don't get deeply technical, but it's a nice introduction, especially on explaining the appeal.

A recent episode had Rob Pike (UTF-8, Go, etc.) on to talk about his array based calculator, Ivy[2]

[1] https://www.arraycast.com/

[2] https://github.com/robpike/ivy

I enjoyed russ cox's advent of code series using rob pike's ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy), an apl-like calculator

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwpzH1_9ufMLOB6BAdzO...

Ivy is an APL-like programming language created by Rob Pike https://github.com/robpike/ivy

Ivy is another APL like language and one I kind of enjoy, because operations are actually readable and writable.

https://github.com/robpike/ivy

I really like Ivy as a simple, friendly introduction to APL. There is a surprising lack of APL-derived languages that use words to name things -- most stick with the original symbols; J and friends choose equally-cryptic symbols composed of ASCII characters.

Earlier this year I decided to solve AoC 2021 in Ivy, then watch Russ Cox's videos to see how he did it and use that to learn something about array programming -- a topic I knew absolutely nothing about going into this.

Unfortunately, Ivy really is, as Rob Pike says, a plaything. It is buggy -- if you ever write a function that returns a vector or a higher-rank array, you are entering bizarre undefined behavior territory. The array-language equivalent of "concat_map" or "flat_map" or "map-cat" or whatever you want to call it just produces garbage values, which is very confusing when you're learning about array programming for the first time ("Wait, this vector says its length is 25, but it contains 50 elements...?" or "The transpose of this array is just the first column repeated over and over??").

Beyond that, a very cool thing about array languages is that, you know, functions can implicitly act on entire arrays. You can multiple a vector by 2 and it will know to multiply every element in the vector by 2, because multiplication is defined for scalars.

But in Ivy, this is only true for the built-in functions. There is no way to write user-defined functions that have this implicit act-on-every-element behavior. Which is basically the looping primitive in array languages -- so to do anything nontrivial, you have to write it out with explicit recursion (still with the caveat that your functions can only return scalars, or you enter undefined behavior town) or rewrite your operations as binary operations with an ignored right-hand side and use "fold" to "map" them. It's bad.

The latter is crippling enough that Russ Cox [eventually forks Ivy](https://github.com/robpike/ivy/pull/83) to add support for it, but it is not currently part of the language.

Anyway that's a long comment to say: Ivy is a good, friendly introduction to APL syntax (stranding, precedence, etc) and some array language concepts, but it is far more of a calculator than a programming language.

But it's a good arbitrary-precision calculator! And if you're still interested in trying it, maybe check out this thing I made. It's an... Ivy programming environment?... that lets you run Ivy scripts and see the results inline. (Ivy's repl is... very primitive, and has to be wrapped by something like readline. Russ Cox uses 9term to get around this; self-modifying programs are my preferred approach.)

https://github.com/ianthehenry/privy

My frustration with Ivy led me to look into other array languages, trying to find one that 1) used English words instead of cryptic symbols and 2) worked. And I really couldn't find any! Someone should do something about that. :)

But your project is all about the command ytdial, so I think having a separate cmd directory is superfluous. Rob Pike also has project ivy which is laid out like this.

Selectrum's wiki has some basic info on completing-read: https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum/wiki/Tips-for-Creating-Commands

[1] https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum/issues/114

I noticed over the weekend that the venerable Selectrum package made by Radon Rosborough has been deprecated in favor of Daniel Mendler's Vertico package.

https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum is getting superceded by https://github.com/minad/vertico within just a year or two.

I have been using straight for a while now and I think it is great! The ability to lazy load everything by default does a lot to make Emacs snappier (or at the very least, faster to boot). Being able to pull packages directly from git (be it local or a forge) makes package development a lot easier. raxod has a lot of really sleek, modern emacs packages that I would encourage everyone to check out, spectrum[0] and ctrf[1] in particular are really great as well.

[0] https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum

selectrum

;;https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum (defun force-debug (func &rest args) (condition-case e (apply func args) ((debug error) (signal (car e) (cdr e))))) (advice-add #'selectrum--minibuffer-post-command-hook :around #'force-debug) (selectrum-mode +1) ;; to make sorting and filtering more intelligent (selectrum-prescient-mode +1) ;; to save your command history on disk, so the sorting gets more ;; intelligent over time (prescient-persist-mode +1) (setq completion-styles '(orderless)) ;; Persist history over Emacs restarts (savehist-mode) ;; Optional performance optimization ;; by highlighting only the visible candidates. (setq orderless-skip-highlighting (lambda () selectrum-is-active)) (setq selectrum-highlight-candidates-function #'orderless-highlight-matches) (setq selectrum-prescient-enable-filtering nil) (selectrum-prescient-mode +1) (prescient-persist-mode +1) (use-package marginalia :ensure t :config (marginalia-mode)) (use-package embark :ensure t :bind (("C-." . embark-act) ;; pick some comfortable binding ("C-;" . embark-dwim) ;; good alternative: M-. ("C-h B" . embark-bindings)) ;; alternative for \describe-bindings' :init ;; Optionally replace the key help with a completing-read interface (setq prefix-help-command #'embark-prefix-help-command) :config ;; Hide the mode line of the Embark live/completions buffers (add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist '("\`\Embark Collect \(Live\|Completions\)\" nil (window-parameters (mode-line-format . none))))) ;; Consult users will also want the embark-consult package. (use-package embark-consult :ensure t :after (embark consult) :demand t ; only necessary if you have the hook below ;; if you want to have consult previews as you move around an ;; auto-updating embark collect buffer :hook (embark-collect-mode . consult-preview-at-point-mode))`

Selectrum and Prescient would be nice.