Functional Programming

Disclaimer: this article is a translation. Original post was published in June, 2015. The first part is here. Let’s go on. For seven f*cking years, I’ve been waiting for a programming language that would meet my requirements. During this time, I’ve tested everything. Everything means all the general-purpose crap and all the not-quite-general-purpose crap. You can’t feel a language only by reading about it and writing “Hello, World!”. To understand the language, you should write at least something with it.

Since I’m going to provoke trolls on the subject of programming languages, and even name the best one in the world (I mean absolutely the best, for sure), I recommend all of them to check out my previous post “Choosing a Programming Language”. Everything mentioned there is still up-to-date, and I wouldn’t’ like to repeat myself here. Read it? Good. Today I am going to talk about the best programming language in the world, and I’ll name it closer to the end of this post.

Frankly speaking, I never faced the question of choosing a programming language. In other words, this choice has always been obvious for me. I never took part in holy wars like C++ vs. Java that used to be so popular at the end of 1990s. When you see a huge growth of productivity with your own eyes, any discussions become meaningless. I’ve also noticed that only people who’ve seen just one side of the given discussion usually take part in it.

Take a look at the brief introduction to the J programming language. It took me two days to write the article. I got familiar with this language a little more than a month ago, when looking for a convenient way for programming on the Pocket PC. All this month, I read books and articles about J, K and APL. I also tried out programs of other developers, wrote some trivial ones of my own and recently wrote my first, non-trivial program, which I improved and described in this article.

Transducers have become quite popular recently. It’s a new feature of the non-released Clojure 1.7. As of writing this, Сlojure 1.7-alpha5 version is the latest development release, but there also appeared a fair number of ports of transducers for such languages as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Java, C++, Lua, Erlang. To tell the truth, it’s a bit disconcerting, the library of reducers was added long ago (in Clojure 1.5). But no one said anything about them; nothing was ported, though they seem to be performing similar things.

You must be kidding me! It’s like programming using regular expressions… You’ll never make me do that again! I’m looking at the code and feel like an idiot. Isn’t it really an esoteric language like brain fuck? Does anyone really use it? And such programs can be read afterwards? quicksort=: (($:@(#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1