I was playing with Uiua, a stack and array programming languages. It was amazing to solve the Advent of Code's problems with just a few lines of code. And as GP said. Once you got the right form of array, the handful of functions the standard library was sufficient.

> One of the issues DSLs give me is that the process of using them invariably obsoletes their utility.

That means your DSL is too specific. It should be targeted at the domain, not at the application.

But yes, it's very hard to make them general enough to be robust, but specific enough to be productive. It takes a really deep understanding of the domain, but even this is not enough.

"APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way - even by adding another diamond - you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud." -- https://wiki.c2.com/?JoelMosesOnAplAndLisp

That particular quote is from the "Epigrams on Programming" article by Alan J. Perlis, from 1982. Lots of ideas/"Epigrams" from that list are useful, and many languages have implemented lots of them. But some of them aren't so obvious until you've actually put it into practice. Full list can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117034445/http://www-pu.inf... (the quote in question is item #9)

I think most people haven't experienced the whole "100 functions on 1 data structures instead of 10 on 10" thing themselves, so there is no attempts to bring this to other languages, as you're not aware of it to begin with.

Then the whole static typing hype (that is the current cycle) makes it kind of difficult because static typing kind of tries to force you into the opposite of "1 function you can only use for whatever type you specify in the parameters", although of course traits/interfaces/whatever-your-language-calls-it helps with this somewhat, even if it's still pretty static.

Because it's domain specific.

If you push this into every kind of application, you will end-up with people recreating objects with lists of lists, and having good reasons to do so.

some of us think in those terms and daily have to fight those who want 20 different objects, each 5-10 deep in inheritance, to achieve the same thing.

I wouldn't say 100 functions over one data structure, but e.g. in python I prefer a few data structures like dictionary and array, with 10-30 top level functions that operate over those.

if your requirements are fixed, it's easy to go nuts and design all kinds of object hierarchies - but if your requirements change a lot, I find it much easier to stay close to the original structure of the data that lives in the many files, and operate on those structures.

Let's think about how an abstraction can be useful, and then redundant.

Logarithms allow us to simplify a hard problem (multiplying large numbers), into a simpler problem (addition), but the abstraction results in an approximation. It's a good enough approximation for lots of situations, but it's a map, not the territory. You could also solve division, which means you could take decent stabs at powers and roots and voila, once you made that good enough and a bit faster, an engineering and scientific revolution can take place. Marvelous.

For centuries people produced log tables - some so frustratingly inaccurate that Charles Babbage thought of a machine to automate their calculation - and we had slide rules and we made progress.

And then a descendant of Babbage's machine arrived - the calculator, or computer - and we didn't need the abstraction any more. We could quickly type 35325 x 948572 and far faster than any log table lookup, be confident that the answer was exactly 33,508,305,900. And a new revolution is born.

This is the path we're on. You don't need to know how multiplication by hand works in order to be able to do multiplication - you use the tool available to you. For a while we had a tool that helped (roughly), and then we got a better tool thanks to that tool. And we might be about to get a better tool again where instead of doing the maths, the tool can use more impressive models of physics and engineering to help us build things.

The metaphor I often use is that these tools don't replace people, they just give them better tools. There will always be a place for being able to work from fundamentals, but most people don't need those fundamentals - you don't need to understand the foundations of how calculus was invented to use it, the same way you don't need to build a toaster from scratch to have breakfast, or how to build your car from base materials to get to the mountains at the weekend.

> But are we not moving into a society where thought is unwelcome?

Not really, no. If anything clear thinking and insight will give an even bigger advantage in a society with pervasive LLM usage. Good prompts don't write themselves.