I think the core reason I created this room, teaching APL and answering questions about APL, is being diluted by lengthy discussions to the point where people actually asking for help run the risk of having their questions be overlooked.
BQN was the first thing I saw when I entered this room for the first time. It didn't put me off.
Making language design off topic won't cut down on lengthy discussions, it'll just make them about other things. There have been plenty of lengthy discussions about APL related topics.
You can't argue that social groups and communities organically mutate with each distinctive member, and this has evolved into an array language forum, more than exclusively an APL learning space. It is that, and also more than that.
@nathanrogers I'm not saying the discussions shouldn't happen. Not at all. I enjoy most of them. I'm just saying that a single room is too little for all that content.
@Adám right, you do hold a monopoly over the primary APL discussion place on the internet. I'm kind of okay with that as long as you don't also become a dictator
I disagree... This is the room. This is the room that people find when searching for array programming. THERE IS NO OTHER ROOM, so instead, use this as a hub, to funnel people into other channels
rather than eliminating the discussion which organically accumulates here
@dzaima you have to understand that this room has pretty much become the single primary place of APL chat discussion, I think it'd be better to spin learning specifically to somewhere else, not move anything that's not learning away
@nathanrogers I'll be honest with you I think this is a response to your verbosity (trying to be nice here), if you cut down the excess a bit and kept things more on topic would you (@Adám) be willing to rethink your decision?
"...generating lots of thought-provoking discussions that feel a lot like the big arguments that I remember witnessing between..." https://www.dyalog.com/blog/2021/02/the-apl-orchard/
I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one here @rak1507 that thinks this isn't a trivial pursuit
as I said, pedantry seems the particular arena of array language users and designers @Adám @rak1507
you'd shove iverson and the lot out of the room for discussing language design
@nathanrogers And that's fine, but lengthy design discussions don't belong here, they merit their own room, making them easier to find and keep together, without interruptions.
@Adám and besides the discussion of "nothing" (which is also legitimate) I was leaving helpful feedback about the design of the website, and tutorial examples
@Adám we've certainly had many long-form bikeshedding episodes every now and then for a while. nathan might have temporarily cranked that up to 11, but, as everything, things would've settled down in some time
My opinion is kind of peripheral because I'm never actually here to discuss APL, but it seems that generally the primarily-APL programmers are also interested in BQN. I definitely did not believe Adam was in control of what's on topic here.
what "stuck" for me about the array languages was the community around it. following discussions, decades in the past, gave life to something otherwise esoteric and obscure. most were about some mathematical or technical insight (there's nothing better than grokk'ing an APL idiom for the first time), but it was the humor, the flashes of character that made really made me engage
nathan's style of chatting may be intense, but i don't mind it. when he was grilling ngn/k, that prompted me to do stop procrastinating and do things i'd been postponing for ages
@Adám we were just fine for months if not years discussing the same things we do now. So either you're changing the rules now because of something that's changed, or you want to retroactively arbitrarily change the topic of the room after we've finally kind of established it as the home of APL discussion
while maintaining a focus is certainly valuable (or frankly, necessary), I don't think it's the one and only goal for what I see as a more relaxed, broad community engaging a lot of folks otherwise outside the established group
@dzaima this is a selfish reason but: while i'm chatting, i often code, debug, compile, time things. i'd prefer a chat that doesn't interfere too much with that. even this chat takes a lot more cpu % than it should. and yeah, java would be overkill.
@Wezl well, it doesn't even have transcripts so you'd pretty much need to make a custom server & log the messages & link by that servers' IDs, at which point, just make your own chat system
@ngn mine takes pretty much 0% while idle, and scrolling 60fps fullscreen (which currently redraws everything) is still 3-5ms per frame, and it should be optimizable further by moving the display from the previous frame to probably get sub-millisecond for small scrolls
with matrix you have multiple UIs and trivial bridging, at least to Freenode. connecting to #apl from a web login at element.io is as easy as clicking a link. And that gets you (personal) transcripts. And then matrix rooms (not bridged to IRC) are perhaps bit more like discord.
@dzaima (memory usage is probably the biggest problem with it being java, but the worst-case scenario of loading all 160000 orchard messages at the same time still takes only 2GB RAM)
@Adám Yes I am interested at APL. A few weeks from now I will work for a financial company and they use APL (A+). I will work manly with Scala but I had my interview question in APL and I found this language to be interesting. I like that it is different and not something like C, Python, Ruby or Scala
@dzaima @rak1507 @Marshall I'm not against either platform. I think discord is more pervasive, and having a link between the two would probably be benficial so people can use their preferred platform
@Adám Yes just started and I found some web pages. I started to use APLcart. One thing I would like to ask: Is there a way to have the result of !14 not to contain E and dot?
I hope I wasn't too brutal there. I don't want the community to die, but I also want it to be welcoming to newcomers, and they do tend to come here first. Many have complained about feeling intimidated by the stream of non-APL (design) discussions.
