It may help to know what he's talking about. He's probably [1] not referring to whether you use C-style || vs. Python's "or". He's probably referring to things like this:
NB. Initialize a global, but not if it's already been initialized
NB. Example: 'name' initifundef 5
initifundef =: (, ('_'&([,],[))@(>@(18!:5)@(0&$)) ) ux_vy ((4 : '(x) =: y')^:(0:>(4!:0)@<@[))
Yeah, I picked the worst thing I could find, and my guess is that that code is doing something really nasty hacky, because it is too large to be doing only what it is described. On the other hand, the fact that I pretty much have to guess with almost no information is sorta my point.
There's creating a computer language to be concise and readable, and then there's just concise. You can also have a look at Perl, which can (and generally should) be programmed as a fairly normal dynamic object-oriented language, but has a subset of functions, operators, and implicit variables that allows you to spit out terribly small, dense lines of few characters that do horrible things, usually not just doing whatever they are putatively doing but also having other mysterious side effects in the process.
[1]: I'm reasonably confident I'm on the right track here, but don't want to put words in his mouth, so I'm hedging. Especially since there's a non-zero chance the original author will show up here. As I type this, that has not happened yet.
Yeah, I picked the worst thing I could find, and my guess is that that code is doing something really nasty hacky, because it is too large to be doing only what it is described. On the other hand, the fact that I pretty much have to guess with almost no information is sorta my point.
There's creating a computer language to be concise and readable, and then there's just concise. You can also have a look at Perl, which can (and generally should) be programmed as a fairly normal dynamic object-oriented language, but has a subset of functions, operators, and implicit variables that allows you to spit out terribly small, dense lines of few characters that do horrible things, usually not just doing whatever they are putatively doing but also having other mysterious side effects in the process.
[1]: I'm reasonably confident I'm on the right track here, but don't want to put words in his mouth, so I'm hedging. Especially since there's a non-zero chance the original author will show up here. As I type this, that has not happened yet.