APL

I keep saying that the more programming languages you know, the more you will understand all the others you know - I’m now at the point where I want to solve every problem I see in a handful of different languages. They all offer different functionality, and some are certainly more suited to particular problems than others, but there’s a world of difference between two characters and importing from two libraries.

Continuing my theme of learning all the languages, I took the opportunity of a programming puzzle to try out the same approach in a handful of different languages to compare how they work.

In this post I explore some differences between R, python, julia, and APL in terms of mutability, and try to make something that probably shouldn’t exist.

At a recent APL-focussed Meetup someone posed a challenge to slice up the components of an IPv4 address with an APL language and it prompted me to learn a bit more about how that works in general and how I could do the processing in APL myself.

I saw a toot celebrating a short, clean implementation of a square root finding algorithm and wanted to dig a bit deeper into how it works, with a diversion into some APL.

I’m solving Advent of Code this year using a relaxed criteria compared to last year in that I’m allowing myself to use packages where they’re helpful, rather than strictly base R. Last year I re-solved half of the exercises using Rust which helped me learn a lot about Rust. This year I’m enamored with APL, and I wanted to share a particularly beautiful solution.

If you’re reading this hoping that I’m done with droning on about array-languages, close the tab… it only gets worse from here. If you thought APL was unreadable, even after my earlier blog posts, again - close button is right there. In this post I try out a brand new stack-based array language and continue to advocate for learning such things.

I keep hearing the assertion that “writing APL/Haskell/etc… makes you think differently” and I kept wondering why I agreed with the statement but at the same time didn’t think too much of it. I believe I’ve figured out that it’s because I happened to have been using Array-aware languages this whole time! It turns out R is an even better language for beginners than I thought.

I’ve been learning at least one new programming language a month through Exercism which has been really fun and interesting. I frequently say that “every language you learn teaches you something about all the others you know” and with nearly a dozen under my belt so far I’m starting to worry about the combinatorics of that statement.

APL isn’t on the list of languages but I’ve seen it in codegolf solutions often enough that it seemed worth a look.