[phantomics]

This is something I go over in the video - an alloy of Lisp and APL works better than either language by itself.

Lisp excels at creating semantic and logical patterns. Macros allow you to build reader-friendly data structures that transform into working code. In the April repo, check out spec.lisp which expresses the top-level spec for the language. Most language implementations don't have this kind of centralized, readable spec where all the language's features and conventions are laid out in one file. The unit tests in this file even constitute a demonstration of what each function and operator does.

APL is for writing algorithms. Data transformations that would take pages of code in other languages can be accomplished with one line of APL. It's trivial to do things like find the color palette of an image and create a copy of the image with another color palette swapped in. Signal processing, machine learning and similar tasks are a snap.

When I created the animations for the Bloxl device, I created a Lisp-based spec for animations with bits of embedded APL. Most animation effects are standardized and have Lisp functions implementing them. However, many patterns have unique algorithms used to implement effects just for that pattern. If I were using Lisp, I would have two choices as to how to do this:

1. Write the unique code into the spec for each pattern, bloating the animation specs with tons of loops to create the special effect. An individual animation spec may go from 12 lines to 60 lines or more doing this.

2. Write a function to implement the special effect. All the special effect functions would have to go into another file somewhere. The animation packages would become bloated with many functions that are only used in one place.

Instead, I can implement the unique effects in APL. It only adds one more line to the spec and avoids both kinds of code bloat described above.