The Nineteenth Byte

12:01 AM

@Uriel My father used to write databases in APL, back in the good old days, where instead of creating a UI, they'd define functions (and later operators too) which would make it possible for users to use (what appeared to be) plain English to issue queries.

ATaco

Now we just use SQL.

(Except when we don't)

Adám

@ATaco Right. And that's pretty much what it looked like. But the amazing thing is that the user could easily define their own extensions, and it would "just work".

ATaco

Episode 1 - Mongo DB Is Web Scale

►

"Shards are the secret incredient in the webscale sauce. They just work."

Uriel

@Adám well, the amazement depends on the savvyness of the viewer

ATaco

Personally I prefer good 'ol .txt because I'm a monster.

Adám

12:06 AM

@ATaco I'm talking early 70's.

ATaco

I understood that much, which is why I said now.

I would have loved to be in the rise of early computing.

Uriel

@ATaco yup, every trivial thing of this era would look like a magic

Adám

@Uriel Try it online!

New Main Posts

0

Q: Give the associated Legendre Polynomial

The challenge: Given two numbers (m and n), return a usable function (such as a lambda function in Python or an anonymous function in MATLAB) that can be used to calculate the associated Legendre Polynomial. If a decimal is inputted, the function should return an error or a NaN. Restriction: Can...

Magic Octopus Urn

@Adám What percentage of APL developers are Jewish? Odd that you coin them all that way haha!

Adám

12:09 AM

@Uriel My father started working for IBM right after they got the new computer which could do multiplications and divisions. You didn't need to write subroutines for that!

ATaco

Imagine showing Regex to Pre-C programmers.

Pavel

@MagicOctopusUrn Adám is, and there's not that many other APL golfers.

Uriel

@Adám that's nice. I think you could do something similar in haskell

Magic Octopus Urn

@Pavel Also meant in terms of the actual development team. Not that it matters, or affects anything. I just remember reading the page of employees a long time ago, seeing "Marshal" and laughing my ass off.

Pavel

@ATaco They already had those back with SNOBOL. The syntax was really different, though.

Uriel

12:12 AM

@Adám no way. Built in multiplication??!

ATaco

"Gah, my CPU is only 3.2 Ghz!"

Adám

@MagicOctopusUrn No, idea frankly. I don't deal much with our customers. APLers just like making puns with APL≈"apple", so I thought APL-Jews≈"apple juice" was cute. We have APL Tree (a utils lib), APL core (crash dumps), ○ is a whole APL pi(e) (i.e. multiply by pi), etc.

7

Magic Octopus Urn

@Adám Omg, lmfao, I've never giggled so hard in public. Thanks for that one. APL JEWS! Lordy... That's wonderful.

Uriel

@ATaco They would claim you as a no programmer. How can code related stuff be readable?!

Pavel

@Uriel I'd say languages like BASIC and COBOL are far more readable than PCRE.

Magic Octopus Urn

12:16 AM

@Adám Do you at least know what sector your most common customer is in? Mathematics? Robotics? Financial? Aeronautics?

Uriel

@Pavel well now when you mention it, I did mess up to much with APL and Perl lately...

Adám

@MagicOctopusUrn You may enjoy this (official) collection of APL puns.

ATaco

Jul 10 at 23:47, by ATaco

@Adám Do or do not, there is no :Try

Adám

@MagicOctopusUrn In terms of number of customers, no. Income? Financial sector, for sure. But production and logistics planning seems to be quite big too.

Pavel

@Uriel SNOBOL regexes were much more readable, according to my dad who actually wrote parsers in it once.

Adám

12:21 AM

@Pavel Readable? My father punched holes into punch cards one bit at a time. He could read and write binary.

Uriel

@Adám binary has dialects. I bet he couldn't read Jelly's binary

Adám

@Uriel It was System/360 assembly in EBCDIC.

Pavel

@Adám I hear stories of that, too. Once someone went through the equivalent of millions of dollars in punch cards with an infinite loop that ran over the weekend.

My dad went to University in Russia during the time of the Soviet Union, mind you, so punch cards were really expensive.

eaglgenes101

I want to make a challenge where the catch is that no character in it is repeated twice

It's kinda hard to make a substantive one for the latin alphabet

Adám

@Pavel One day at IBM, someone turned on the computer without starting the air conditioning an hour before… Ouch.

eaglgenes101

12:31 AM

So would one for chinese work?

There's a classic thousand-character poem where none is repeated twice

Adám

@eaglgenes101 You can edit your posts by hovering over the left side. (See?)

eaglgenes101

Good to know

Sounds like a good kologmorov complexity challenge?

Adám

@eaglgenes101 Also, remember to "reply" (hover over right side of message you want to reply to) so others can see what you are referring to, and the target gets a ping.

@eaglgenes101 Meh, my solutions rarely have letters in them ;-)

Pavel

@Adám Ah yes, the good old days of the graphics driver you wrote yourself failing and blowing out your monitor.

Destructible Lemon

@Adám left side?

oh there's both

eaglgenes101

12:35 AM

Thousand Character Classic

The Thousand Character Classic (Chinese: 千字文; pinyin: Qiānzìwén), also known as the Thousand Character Text, is a Chinese poem that has been used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains exactly one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters apiece and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorize. It is sung in a way similar to children learning the Latin alphabet singing an "alphabet song." Along with the Three Character Classic and the Hundred Family Surnames, it formed the...

Destructible Lemon

i didn't even notice that before

well i almost noticed

eaglgenes101

Kologmorov complexity challenges consistently have obvious patterns

I want to shake that up by putting down one where there aren't obvious patterns

Except that all the characters are chinese

Adám

@Pavel What's a "monitor"?

@eaglgenes101 But there is a pattern? So it is just a matter of waiting for the first post to show the pattern, and then the game is on?

eaglgenes101

At the very least, all the characters are relatively high BMP codepoints in unicode, and are delineated in a predictable pattern

I wonder if it's possible to take advantage of the lack of character repetition in the poem to squeeze some more bytes out of the solved solution

Pavel

@Adám That was a little later, I suppose. They already had Assembly.

Adám

12:43 AM

@Pavel I think assembly was with general purpose computers from day 1, basically.

Destructible Lemon

@Adám you're not a REAL programmer if you need user friendly command names

Adám

@DestructibleLemon You're an APL programmer if your commands don't need names.

ATaco

Real Programmers use Butterflies.

Destructible Lemon

yeah ok

eaglgenes101

Real programmers get their computer to do everything for them, so they don't ever need to touch it

Destructible Lemon

12:45 AM

@eaglgenes101 no

Pavel

@Adám Did they have those back in 1949? Because apparantly that's when Assembly was created.

Adám

@Pavel Hey, I didn't say that they didn't have assembly before day 1.

Pavel

:P

Destructible Lemon

did they have them on day 0?

Adám

@DestructibleLemon One of my colleagues once during a presentation pretended to have called ⎕DL with a negative number.

Destructible Lemon

12:56 AM

@Adám sci-fi music plays

Adám

@DestructibleLemon Unfortunately, I don't think it was recorded. You can here him in a hilarious (imho) sketch here. @MagicOctopusUrn, you may appreciate it too.

Pavel

@Adám /me doesn't know what ⎕DL is

Destructible Lemon

click the link

Adám

@Pavel I linked the doc.

Destructible Lemon

@Adám haha ninja'd

Pavel

12:59 AM

@DestructibleLemon Ah, I have syntax highlighting on for chat so I didn't see it was a link

Destructible Lemon

@Pavel feature request...

Neil

1:14 AM

@cairdcoinheringaahing I have more gold badges than I have questions...

ATaco

1:46 AM

I have infinitely more challenges than gold badges.

Destructible Lemon

@ATaco I have 3 gold badges muhahaha

DJMcMayhem

@Neil That's hilarious

HyperNeutrino

I am waiting patiently for the delay I stop being the highest rep user without a gold badge D:

ATaco

#Imcommingforyou

Oh, I forgot the Unary Minus operator for Funky.

Destructible Lemon

@HyperNeutrino obviously you don't spend enough time on the site

ATaco

1:51 AM

It's got Bitwise not, but no Unary Minus.

New Main Posts

1

Q: The thousand character classic

Background The Thousand Character Classic is a chinese poem written around the 4th Century CE in China, and memorized by large populations since then. The name comes from not only its length, but its number of characters: each character occurs only once in the text. It is commonly used to teach ...

code-golf kolmogorov-complexity unicode

HyperNeutrino

@DestructibleLemon strange, I'm usually told I spend too much time on the site

then again, I do, just not enough time answering questions lol

Destructible Lemon

i mean you don't have fanatic

HyperNeutrino

well that's because I got deleted at 97 days

and then I just gave up

I mean it is my fault but still lol

Destructible Lemon

@HyperNeutrino ._. sad

HyperNeutrino

1:57 AM

oh what I'm at 71 days

lol I might be able to get this

wondering what comes first, fanatic or gold code-golf?

I have 29 days and 98 score to go for them

ATaco

Christopher 2EZ 4RTZ

2:41 AM

fun fact: in dota2 using a hero and a few minor game changes you can make a computer

@Adám I read your bio on dylog and noticed this: Adám prides himself on having got APL with the breast-milk, as he attended his first APL conference at the age of one.

HELLO???

ASCII-only

2:54 AM

@Christopher2EZ4RTZ what about it

Christopher 2EZ 4RTZ

@ASCII-only does nothing about that statement sound odd?

ASCII-only

Nope

His father did work at Dyalog

@Mego Too bad it's not 3D :P

Christopher 2EZ 4RTZ

@ASCII-only ಠ__ಠ

Pavel

3:21 AM

@Christopher2EZ4RTZ I think that's just you

New Main Posts

3:40 AM

1

Q: Output an Anagram! No Not That One!

Given a list of unique strings that are anagrams of each other, output an anagram of those words that is different from each word in the list. The strings will be alphanumeric, and there is guaranteed to be a valid anagram. The program or function can, but doesn't have to be non-deterministic, ...

code-golf string permutations

New Sandboxed Posts

5:53 AM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Paper Sizes code-golfkolomogrov-complexity Task: Given a letter (A, B, C), and a number (0-10), output the size of the matching standard paper size (Series A and B) or the matching standard envelope size (C series) in millimetres in the format aaaa x bbbb where aaaa and bbbb are the width and...

Marcus Andrews

6:27 AM

Any shorter way to permute inputs by designates indices?

e.g.

4
abcd
4 3 2 1

output: dcba

current approach:

i=input
i()
c=i()
print(''.join(c[int(k)-1]for k in i().split()))

Pavel

@MarcusAndrews What's the first line for?

Marcus Andrews

number of letters

i just toss the input

Pavel

Ah

Anonymous

Probably not a shorter way than that

Marcus Andrews

what about ruby?

Anonymous

6:30 AM

IDK about Ruby

Anonymous

To me, Ruby is an excellent Pokemon game

Marcus Andrews

XD

Pavel

n,s=gets.to_i,gets
(0...n).each{|x|$><<s[gets.split.map(&:to_i)[x]+1]}

@MarcusAndrews ^

Marcus Andrews

interesting

Pavel

Although, I just realized it's probably better to do something more like the python one you had

Marcus Andrews

6:37 AM

I have another one that's just reading n and then outputting the binary of the next n ints each on their own line) -- I can't use your dollar-sign trick for that right? (my approach here is gets.to_i.times{puts gets.to_i.to_s 2} )

(also just learned that sometimes you can ditch the parens)

Pavel

gets;s,i=gets,gets.split.map(&:to_i)
i.each{|x|$><<s[x+1]}

Marcus Andrews

I think you beat me with that one

although when I try it it only outputs "dc"

Pavel

6:53 AM

@MarcusAndrews replace +1 with -1

Marcus Andrews

ah

Pavel

Oops

gets;s=gets
gets.split.map(&:to_i).each{|x|$><<s[x-1]}

@MarcusAndrews Fixed and made shorter

gets;s=gets
gets.split.each{|x|$><<s[x.to_i-1]}

Even shorter

Marcus Andrews

looks similar to the python approach

but shorter XD

Adám

@ASCII-only No, he was an early APL adopter, though. Dyalog didn't exist yet…

Adám

7:18 AM

@Christopher2EZ4RTZ I was with my parents at the May 10-14, 1987 APL conference in Dallas, Texas, USA. I didn't turn two until June 25 that year. I was supposed to demonstrate that even a toddler could use some proposed UI, but unfortunately someone mistook a screwdriver for plain orange juice and I ended up sleeping through my session.

caird coinheringaahing

7:52 AM

@Adám So, you get drunk at one when supposed to use APL? Who says programmers can't have fun :P

Pavel

@Adám How do you confuse a screwdriver for juice

caird coinheringaahing

Screwdriver (cocktail)

A screwdriver is a popular alcoholic highball drink made with orange juice and vodka. While the basic drink is simply the two ingredients, there are many variations; the most common one is made with one part vodka, one part of any kind of orange soda, and one part of orange juice. Many of the variations have different names in different parts of the world. The International Bartender Association has designated this cocktail as an IBA Official Cocktail. == History == This drink appears in literature as early as 1938 "And answered it 'The famous Smirnoff Screwdriver', Just pour a jigger of smirnoff...

Pavel

Oooohh

DJMcMayhem

8:17 AM

@cairdcoinheringaahing That actually sounds really really tasty

On a completely unrelated note, I just slammed my car door on my finger.

It was unpleasant

New Main Posts

8:46 AM

1

Q: Bitwise XOR of rational numbers

Introduction Every rational number between 0 and 1 can be represented as an eventually periodic sequence of bits. For example, the binary representation of 11/40 is 0.010 0011 0011 0011 ... where the 0011 part repeats indefinitely. One way of finding this representation is the following. Star...

code-golf rational-numbers bitwise

ASCII-only

9:03 AM

@Adám Oh, my bad

Adám

@ASCII-only How would you know? :-)

ASCII-only

well if I did some research I'm sure I'd be able to find Dyalog's founding date, probably?

Also you've mentioned a bit about it in TNB I think

mınxomaτ

11:59 AM

Classic Docker team.

orlp

@mınxomaτ what's the feature?

mınxomaτ

1:17 PM

@orlp Closing ports that might have been EXPOSEd by parent Dockerfiles

Or a more general UNSET command

Neil

wonders whether @Adám has heard of the "The_Dark_Lord" guy from this comments page: thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/theory-versus-reality

Anonymous

1:40 PM

@mınxomaτ Got it: abuse open ports in Docker's enterprise software until they fix it

Adám

@Neil No, but it makes sense. However, who needs about 6 APL LOC?

@Neil

{⍵{((+/b)⌿⍵),⍺|(,b)/⍳×/⍴b←~↑(⊂⍳⍺)∊¨(↓⍵)+[0]¨⊂(c-⍳c←1↓⍴⍵)∘.×¯1 0 1}⍣⍵⍳1 0}

(from dfns.dyalog.com)

Stewie Griffin

1:56 PM

@DJMcMayhem A screwdriver is not really really tasty! It's awful! The only reason to use orange juice is because it has a very distinct and strong taste, so it compensates for the bad vodka taste. At least that's what we did in our teens...

Adám

@StewieGriffin You can't fool a <2yo into drinking something awful.

Fatalize

Is it called a screwdriver because it screws you up?

Stewie Griffin

@Fatalize Yes! The Sundays sucked!

I bet Adám had a rough morning following that event too... I'm willing to place a fairly big bet that Adám cried that day!

Anonymous

Screwdrivers are wonderful :)

Stewie Griffin

@Adám Try it (offline), and we can continue the discussion! :P

Transcript for