Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)

The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)

3 comments

·August 1, 2025
Visit

RodgerTheGreat

I wrote a blog post some time ago which contrasts the "Schwartzian transform" with the slightly clearer alternative used by most APL-family languages and (in my opinion) an even cleaner approach which is possible in languages with a first-class table type: https://beyondloom.com/blog/rankingoffruits.html

inopinatus

That was a lovely vignette, thanks. Much earlier in my career I had exactly the sense of “something’s off” about the Schwartzian, even though it became a useful and idiomatic tool at the time. I only really understood the disquiet much later, when working with columnar data, and realising the positive qualities of declaring structs-of-arrays rather than arrays-of-structs, with subsequently excellent mechanical sympathy, and so on from there.

mont_tag

Python's key-functions nicely encapsulate the whole process.