The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

It's all Greek to me

I knew APL is terse and incomprehensible, but seeing Conway's Game of Life in APL was mindblowing (link via Hacker News):

life ← { ⊃ 1 ω ∨ . ∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ 1 0 ‾1 ∘.θ 1 - ‾1 Φ″ ⊂ ω }

(I think that's close—it was hard to find the right symbols) Yes, that really does calculate a single generation. To run multiple generations was one additional line of code:

{} { pic∘ ← '⋅☻'[ω] ◊ _←[]dl ÷8 ◊ life ω } ★≡ RR

I remember years ago at a ham fest I was on the lookout for IBM keyboards (the only true keyboard, mind you) and I missed picking up an honest-to-god IBM APL keyboard by just seconds—a friend I was with got to it before I did (grrrrrrrr, and at $5, it was certainly a steal).

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