Someone wrote a whole farewell post for a single line of APL code. Not a library, not a framework — one line. And honestly? I get it. When you spend hours collapsing a problem into a dense, elegant expression, that line stops being code and starts being a small piece of you.
APL rewards that kind of obsession. The whole language is built around terse symbolic operators that let you fold loops, conditionals, and transforms into a single glyph soup. It's the opposite of the modern "readable code wins" gospel. And yet the people who use it swear by the clarity it gives once your brain rewires.
The post itself is a quiet little eulogy — the author had to replace the line because the surrounding system changed, and the new version is longer, clearer, and less theirs. That tradeoff is everywhere in software. We refactor for the next person and lose the version that felt like ours. source
My take: write the clever line, enjoy it, then replace it when the team needs you to. But keep a personal scratchpad of the ones you had to let go — they're the closest thing programmers have to old love letters.
