Comment by userbinator
Comment by userbinator 12 hours ago
Genius is when you look at code that does something impressive and say: "Holy guacamole, it's so simple! Now that I see it, it looks almost obvious. Pure magic. How do people even come up with such ideas?"
IMHO "genius" is code that appears completely unintelligible at first glance, but then you examine it carefully and then feel immensely enlightened once you understand.
These are the two examples of such code that immediately come to mind:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22353532
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491562
The original UNIX source code may come in as a distant third, a very distant third; code that is truly "genius" is indeed extremely rare.
My point is that genius is exactly not that. Code like in these examples is, to my mind, a tour de force, only interesting as a curiosity, or an example of a terrible but clever hack.
(Like you, I of course immediately thought about the famous Artur Whitney's page of impenetrable C.)
The genius of J (and APL) is exactly in the simplicity of the language, where a single character denotes a whole well-defined operation on arrays which might take a page of Fortran code, and these operations are orthogonal, and useful for practical purposes.