What does HackerNews think of APL.jl?

Julia spells "scan" as "accumulate". I don't think we have something exactly like replicate out of the box, but it's a one-line function definition away:

     replicate(inds, v) = mapreduce(((i, n),) -> fill(v[i], n), vcat, enumerate(inds))

I agree with the spirit of your point though. Having operations like this as part of your 'alphabet' can be a really powerful thing. That's why I think APL is really well suited to being a domain specific language embedded in a language like julia. Shashi took a stab at this a few years ago, but it'd be nice to revive it: https://github.com/shashi/APL.jl

Perl was my horse in the race. I attribute it's, lisp's, ruby's, etc loss to 1. "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" being part of python's ethos. 2. ipython repl

1. pairs with jaimebuelta's artistic vs engineering dichotomy, but also plays into the scientist wearing many more hats than just programmer. Code can be two or more degrees removed from the published paper -- code isn't the passion. There isn't reason, time, or motivation to think deeply about syntax.

2. For a lot of academic work, the programming language is primarily an interface to an advanced plotting calculator. Or at least that's how I think about the popularity of SPSS and Stata. Ipython and then jupyter made this easy for python.

For what it's worth, the lab I work for is mostly using shell, R, matlab, and tiny bit of python. For numerical analysis, I like R the best. It has a leg up on the interactive interface and feels more flexible than the other two. R also has better stats libraries. But when we need to interact with external services or file formats, python is the place to look (why PyPI beat out CPAN is similar question).

Total aside: Perl's built in regexp syntax is amazing and a thing I reach for often, but regular expressions as a DSL are supported almost everywhere (like using languages other than shell to launch programs and pipes -- totally fine but misses all the ergonomics of using the right tool for the job). It'd love to explore APL as an analogous numerical DSL across scripting languages. APL.jl [0] and, less practically april[1], are exciting.

[0] https://github.com/shashi/APL.jl [1] https://github.com/phantomics/april

In Julia: https://github.com/shashi/APL.jl

There's a start for this in Julia[0], where custom string literals mean that you can actually write APL in native Julia:

    julia> apl"ι5"
    1:5

    julia> apl"+/ι5"
    15

You can even just get the function that represents the `+/` operation and apply it to any Julia object:

    julia> apl"+/"(rand(100))
    52.17866879741195

0. https://github.com/shashi/APL.jl