I love learning programming, and also math, because I feel like my mind is blown every time I come across a new concept.
However, it's rare for that feeling to obtain just by programming in a language. One language that (so far) has consistently had that feeling even when simply programming in it is Dyalog APL.
To think that it's so expressive that naming things is often unnecessary, the name being the function itself.... It feels like I'm playing with raw essence.
+/÷≢ is the classic example, of course. That's four characters -- the "tally" character at the end tends to render wrong in browsers, but I assure you it really is only one character. Four characters! What is the name of the function? Either "Mean", or "Average", one of which is four characters itself, and the other longer. Of course, you could just say, "Avg", but why bother?
And this contains in itself another example. +/ being "Sum", which is longer. And "Product" is an even higher contrast: ×/
This language also has the added mind-blowing feature where the glyphs are often visually related when they are functionally related.
So "Scan" is \. Therefore, "Running Sum" aka "Plus Scan" is +\. Likewise "Running Product" aka "Multiply Scan" is -- you guessed it! -- ×\.
And there is so much more. I've been doing APL for a while now (IDR if it's a full year yet or not, but it's getting close I think), and it keeps blowing my mind over and over again. It's gotten to the point where when writing APL I feel like I'm just spelling out my thoughts for the most part. I've never gotten that feeling in any other language, and it's a mind-blowing feeling.
However, it's rare for that feeling to obtain just by programming in a language. One language that (so far) has consistently had that feeling even when simply programming in it is Dyalog APL.
To think that it's so expressive that naming things is often unnecessary, the name being the function itself.... It feels like I'm playing with raw essence.
+/÷≢ is the classic example, of course. That's four characters -- the "tally" character at the end tends to render wrong in browsers, but I assure you it really is only one character. Four characters! What is the name of the function? Either "Mean", or "Average", one of which is four characters itself, and the other longer. Of course, you could just say, "Avg", but why bother?
And this contains in itself another example. +/ being "Sum", which is longer. And "Product" is an even higher contrast: ×/
This language also has the added mind-blowing feature where the glyphs are often visually related when they are functionally related.
So "Scan" is \. Therefore, "Running Sum" aka "Plus Scan" is +\. Likewise "Running Product" aka "Multiply Scan" is -- you guessed it! -- ×\.
And there is so much more. I've been doing APL for a while now (IDR if it's a full year yet or not, but it's getting close I think), and it keeps blowing my mind over and over again. It's gotten to the point where when writing APL I feel like I'm just spelling out my thoughts for the most part. I've never gotten that feeling in any other language, and it's a mind-blowing feeling.