Our great sponsors
-
aplette
This is a new take on an old language: APL. The goal is to pare APL down to its elegant essence. This version of APL is oriented toward scripting within a Unix-style computing environment.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
If you're interested in recent developments in array languages, I recommend checking out:
BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/
ngn/k https://git.sr.ht/~ngn/k/tree/master/item/readme.txt (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009241)
aplette, which is a modernization of Ken Thompson's APL https://github.com/gregfjohnson/aplette (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740536)
I'd also recommend checking out J, which isn't a recent development, but has the best syntax out of all array languages, has the best development environments, is the easiest to learn (it has a way to learn it built into the language itself!), and is the only one that treats making GUIs as a first-class feature: jsoftware.com (Has so many previous discussions I just recommend using HN search to find them.)
The chat is biased to Dyalog APL, but a lot of the modern additions Dyalog has made to the language make it (in my opinion) worse as a notation, so ideally don't let it turn you off of the concept of array languages entirely if Dyalog doesn't "click" with you.
If you haven't already, you should also check out Notation as a Tool of Thought, a paper so good it won Iverson the Turing Award:
https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...