alt.hn

4/6/2026 at 7:40:57 PM

War on Raze

 https://gist.github.com/chrispsn/af6844b80687462814fc39d4b97399a6

by tosh

4/10/2026 at 9:02:30 AM

You know that feeling where you feel like you have a good handle on things- maybe it's foundational mathematics, or the fundamentals of computer software.

And you start reading something so incomprehensible that you start to wonder if there's just this universe hiding in plain sight directly under the universe you've always known.

That is the precise feeling I get when I trying to understand this post.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the exposure, but damn if I'm not sweating trying to understand why this all matters.

by dijit

4/10/2026 at 9:42:50 AM

> Range is just shallow odometer: ![3]~*!,3.

Ah of course, of course. Trivially, even. Who are we to question the shallow odometers, really?

by mcdeltat

4/10/2026 at 9:24:43 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

As far as I can tell, it seems to be something halfway between TempleOS and MUMPS but its a programming language instead of an OS. I don't think you are missing some deep meaning. Its more that this is written in an esoteric language which seems to be more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications. He's just looking at ways to make more efficient code in K (the language). But it does look sort of like he is talking about math theorems (he isn't).

by hunterpayne

4/10/2026 at 10:15:06 AM

> more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications.

I have the same feeling. The root of K is APL, but to avoid special characters (I assume), the same symbol has multiple meanings (overloaded), depending on eg. the position, the data type, and the context. The idea is that "programs should be short enough to fit in your head." The challenge is, similar to Perl and Regex syntax, it's very hard and often cryptic to read.

I do think a concise syntax is useful, for a programming language. But at the same time, the syntax should be readable, and that probably means that each symbol or operator must only have one meaning, and that meaning should be (more or less) obvious.

K is an array language. Even an integer is actually an array of one element. I think that makes sense for a tiny language: This is the simplest possible type system. You can even support strings, when using eg. metadata or using a heuristic like "a string is always zero terminated" (which is what I used for my tiny language).

by thomasmg

4/10/2026 at 11:03:05 AM

wasnt there another post about using these eso lang as intelligence tests for AI?

Reading that certainly requires more than symbol shunting.

by cyanydeez

4/10/2026 at 10:59:36 AM

> Next up - the War on Lambdas

I don't know array based languages well but I want to read the next one.

by tsuru