The title would probably be confusing, but I could not make it better than this. I noticed that most programming languages are limited to the alphanumerical set along with the special characters present in a general keyboard. I wondered if this posed a barrier for developers on what characters they were limited to program in, or if it was intentional from the start that these keys would be the most optimal characters for a program to be coded in by a human and was later adopted as a standard for every user. Basically, are the modern keyboards built around programming languages or are programming languages built around these keyboards?
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From one of the many How to shoot yourself in the foot guides, for APL:
A fascinating language to look at, Conway’s Game of Life is simply
life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}
, but I have zero interest in ever actually learning it ;)There are also keyboards with the proper symbols:
The core of that Life expression works by taking the array of cells and shifting it in the eight different directions, then summing those arrays to get the population counts.
I tried translating this into Python — but I’ve never written
numpy
code before, so this is probably less efficient than it could be. But it does work and you can see a glider move through a few generations.The array-shifting logic is in the
populations
function, withnp.roll
being the equivalent of the APL rotate operation (written as⌽
and⊖
in the original).Yeah, that looks closer to what I remember from university ;)