Since this flurry of APL/J/K/A+/Q articles started, I've been wondering about the relationship between APLs and literate programming.
They say that APL was developed to mimic mathematical notation, and I see the resemblance. But real works of mathematics consist of one or two lines of expressions separated by sentences and paragraphs explaining the goal of those expressions.
So far in K "advertising" I only see the expressions and not the explanations. The explanation is there, but it's not a comment in the codebase; it's in a blog post that explains it. The code has many lines of expressions on top of each other, and nobody writes math that way.
I feel like I'm missing something, basically. It's clear how to write K, but what are the best practices for making a large codebase readable? I shouldn't have to invent that myself, right?
They say that APL was developed to mimic mathematical notation, and I see the resemblance. But real works of mathematics consist of one or two lines of expressions separated by sentences and paragraphs explaining the goal of those expressions.
So far in K "advertising" I only see the expressions and not the explanations. The explanation is there, but it's not a comment in the codebase; it's in a blog post that explains it. The code has many lines of expressions on top of each other, and nobody writes math that way.
I feel like I'm missing something, basically. It's clear how to write K, but what are the best practices for making a large codebase readable? I shouldn't have to invent that myself, right?