There are quite a few assumptions in your comment that you could investigate if you wanted to. That might be more interesting than just being disgusted.

actually the opening comment hit home pretty concisely, i implore you to read the code in question, the examples rasied, and to come back and tell me that you would be happy to work with this code base.

the author themselve states that they are responsible for the majority of commits. this should be a red-flag, itself.

It is very common for large APL projects to require only a single person to maintain most of the source for a large portion of its life. While this doesn't help the bus factor much, it's not the red-flag it would be in other languages.

Sounds like the reason is nobody else will touch it. Once the author is gone, you end up scrapping the project.

This is a commercially funded project, there are other people reading and working with the code. There's just rarely a reason for them to commit any changes.

Why don't you just point those assumptions out? I haven't the slightest clue what "assumptions" you are talking about and how to go about investigating them. The code is disgusting, not a single variable has a meaningful name.

One assumption is that code should make sense to anyone who doesn't know the language it's written in. We wouldn't apply that to C, or to English for that matter, so why APL?

Another assumption is that short variable names always make a program more obscure.

Another assumption is that concision makes a program less readable. This assumption runs so deep that it's hard to even see it, but consider: one concise line of code is harder to read than one verbose line, but much easier to read than a million verbose lines. That is, in the time it would take me to understand a million lines of verbose code, I could learn the language of a concise program from scratch, work with its short (and at first obscure) codebase long enough to understand it, and still have orders of magnitude to spare. At some point on the code size curve, the tradeoffs change dramatically.

I don't know the OP's program but I can tell you that the APL culture is a mature, sophisticated, and beautiful approach to programming that occupies a different local optimum than most programmers are used to. To react to this not just with disagreement but outrage ("disgusting"!) is quite interesting. There's something threatening about encountering an approach to one's area of expertise that is so radically different, based on such different assumptions, as to be outright alien. Our reflex is to dismiss it forcefully. But if you can catch yourself doing that and stay with the unfamiliar long enough to get over the "disgust" response, the reward is magical.

A more familiar example to many on HN of the same regrettable response would be the way React was first received. Despite having an interesting approach to solving some common practical problems in web development, and despite the underlying theory being tried and tested in other contexts, some people seemed to reject it just because it didn't maintain a clear separation of HTML, CSS and JS code, which in their minds was a deal-breaker even though there's no objective reason that such a separation is necessary.

They have exceptionally meaningful names, they're just not English ones.

Sorry, could you provide a quick/rough English translation of one of those lines? I'm unfamiliar with APL or how Chinese characters are written with Latin symbols, so it would be useful for 'seeing' the syntax.

I can provide even better. If you look at the Publications:

https://github.com/arcfide/Co-dfns#publications

You can read the "Key" paper that walks you through one of the core data structures in the compiler and how it works. If you see the "rn" binding in the compiler code in "e.cd" you'll see that code put into the first compiler pass of the project.

If you want to see more than that, I can email you a copy of an updated version of that paper which is currently under review (not likely to see publishing this round). It includes descriptions of the implementations of the "lf" and "fe" compiler passes.

Not disagreeing, but for the sake of discussion: Do you care to elaborate?

In defense of the code: It disgusts you. I find it very pleasant to read. That means it is not disgusting.

I wouldn't ordinarily want to make this personal. But you, who cannot be bothered with grammar, punctuation, or the shift key, want to make a statement about this code. You must understand it is a personal statement more about yourself than the code you are looking at.

Here is someone who does something you admit you cannot do, and you say don't do that! Don't do the things I cannot do! What a missed opportunity! If I see someone do something I cannot do I say how do you do that? Why do you do that?