Top all-time · #8763
Rigorous Nonsense
Personal blog · blog.wilsonb.com/postsprogramming
Rigorous Nonsense is a personal blog at blog.wilsonb.com about programming. Since 2024, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times, most often “Readable Code Is Unreadable: Incunabulum, an Implementation of J”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The blog breaks down Arthur Whitney's terse C code and the J Incunabulum by teaching the APL ideas behind it. HN commenters link it as one of several explanations of that code.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Readable Code Is Unreadable: Incunabulum, an Implementation of J7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-06-06
- Easy Random Trees3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-23
- Hsu's Suggestivity and Idioms (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-15
What Hacker News says?
> The way to understand Arthur Whitney's C code is to first learn APL This is the main insight in my breakdown of the J Incunabulum: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... When I first encountered it years ago, the thing was impenetrable, but after learning APL to a high level, it now reads like a simple, direct expression of intent. The code even clearly communicates design tradeoffs and th…
Comment linking /posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-unreadable.html
on “Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)”Submitted Implementing Brainfuck in APL as a story · 72 points
HN discussionI love these explorations! Thanks for sharing. > Hui can list the entire interpreter in the appendix because it’s just that single page, 122 lines of incredibly cryptic C, which you can view here: I count 41 lines, but more interestingly and by pure luck, I just happened to make a post about this less than an hour ago: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u...
Comment linking /posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-unreadable.html
on “Small Programs and Languages”Submitted Readable Code Is Unreadable: Incunabulum, an Implementation of J as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot a joke, and a famous piece of J lore! There have a been at least a couple attempts I've seen posted here of blog posts breaking down the code in a beginner friendly way. One I dug up is: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... Related: https://needleful.net/blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html
Comment linking /posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-unreadable.html
on “An Implementation of J (1992)”Submitted Readable code is unreadable: Arthur Whitney's J incunabulum as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJust noticed this, but intriguingly, Catalan numbers are (2n C n)/(n+1), which hints at a connection with trees. Off the cuff, notice that the diagonal has n+1 intersection points, and a path that never passes through the diagonal gives a forest via the isomorphism with ballot sequences [0]. Any sequence that does pass below the diagonal can be "rotated" into one that doesn't, and so there are probably n+1 paths in…
Comment linking /posts/2026-02-27-easy-random-trees.html
on “My Mathematical Regression”Submitted Readable Code Is Unreadable as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWith an OR 2-scan, you can avoid the negation. Here's how I'd do it in APL: {⍵⌿⍨2∨⌿0⍪' '≠⍵}. In general, I find that boolean 2-scans pop up quite a bit in real-world APL usage. It's worth working through them. I have a short article [0] on the subject, if you're interested. It's also worth thinking through how all 16 boolean operators work on boolean masks. E.g. what do msk≠msk2, msk<msk2, msk≤msk2 etc. mean? In my…
Comment linking /posts/2023-07-24-suggestivity-and-idioms.html
on “Saying Goodbye to one line of APL”Submitted Easy Random Trees as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2] It's been discussed here before too. [0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html
Comment linking /posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-unreadable.html
on “War on Raze”Submitted Easy Random Trees as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hsu's Suggestivity and Idioms (2023) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Does ⍋⍋ Even Mean? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Readable Code Is Unreadable as a story · 1 points
HN discussion