[lokedhs]

You're not wrong. It's very easy to get that impression when trying to learn the array languages. It's very easy for someone who's used these languages for a long time to look at a problem, and say "why did you use that really elaborate solution, when you can just use ⍸⍣¯1?". No one probably ever told you that ⍸ has an inverse, and how you could use it.

Even today, after having worked in these languages for years, I am still put off a bit by the walls of code that some array programmers produce. I fully understand the reasoning why it's written like that, but I just prefer a few spaces in my code.

I've been working on an array language based on APL, and one of my original goals was to make "imperative style" programming more of a first-class citizen and not punish the beginner from using things like if-statements. It remains to be seen how well I succeeded, but even I tend to use a more expressive style when terseness doesn't matter.

Here's an example of code I've written which is the part of the implementation that is responsible for taking any value (such as nested arrays) and format them nicely as text using box drawing characters. I want to say that this style is a middle ground between the hardcore pure APL style found in some projects and the style you'll see in most imperative languages: https://codeberg.org/loke/array/src/branch/master/array/stan...

[upghost]

Very nice! I like the readability-- not sure if thats just indicative of your style or the language, and the map construct is also nice. I don't remember any off-the-shelf map construct, at least not in Dyalog.

[xelxebar]

Dyalog doesn't have an explicit implementation for maps, but you get the same effect with column-major table stores and the implicit hashmap backing of the search-like primitives [0]. E.g.

    keys←'foo' 'bar' 'baz'
    values←1729 42 0.5721

    indexOf←keys∘⍳  ⍝ The dyadic ⍳ here is what builds a hashmap

Then you can use it like

    data←(values⍪¯1)[indexOf 'bar' 'bar' 'baz' 'foo' 'invalid' 'foo']

where ¯1 is just the value you want missing keys to map to. If you're okay erroring in that case, it can be left off. For map "literals", a syntax like the following gets you there for now:

    k v ←'foo' 1729
    k v⍪←'bar' 42
    k v⍪←'baz' 0.5721

In version 20, proper array literal notation [1] is landing, where you'll be able to do:

    keys  values←↓⍉[
    'foo' 1729
    'bar' 42
    'baz' 0.5721]

In practice, I suspect that this ends up being more ergonomic than actual maps would be in the language. That said K is all about maps and the entire language is designed around them instead of arrays like APL. IIRC, there was also some discussion on the J forums a while back about whether or not to have explicit hashmap support [2].

[0]:https://help.dyalog.com/19.0/#Language/Defined%20Functions%2...

[1]:https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Array_notation

[2]:https://groups.google.com/a/jsoftware.com/g/forum/c/VYmmHyRo...

[lokedhs]

It's likely a combination of both. It's certainly possible to write Kap in a much more condensed form. But things like if-statements and hash maps does allow for a more imperative style.