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0 pointsedblarney9y ago0 comments

Yup, I agree on the 'smaller architecture' bit.

One more point: I find that there are a lot of very common things that we, as developers, have not 'standardized' on - but if we did, it would be beneficial.

The underscore/lodash JS libraries are great examples of this.

They are not just a bunch of 'helper functions' - they are really a series of new 'functional keywords' that in a way represent a new paradigm in software: we all get used to these 'mini patterns' and call them the same thing, and when used in code they can make things a lost simpler.

Map, reduce, find, each, pull, filter etc. etc. - at first glance it would seem compulsive to jam all these into some code - but once the developers are familiar with them ... guess what - they become almost part of the programming language itself.

So I think this is a pretty good example of a 'meta' way to facilitate simplicity: agree on names for very common patterns, and abstract them away with tools or linguistic constructs.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

arcfide9y ago· 2 in thread

Congratulations, you just listed some of the main APL primitives. They've been standardized and given standard names, even in Unicode, since the 70's or 80's? Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-)

lmm9y ago

Many of them are present in the original lisp paper from 1960. Under standard names like "map" and "search" that are concise but still words.

arcfide9y ago

Indeed, many of these ideas as expressed in APL come from the 1962 book, "A Programming Language."

I find it unfortunate that these ideas are only now beginning to find some general acceptance in larger, more mainstream languages.

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