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"The APL & J examples aren't very enticing to me. I'm curious about them, but I wouldn't want to work in a codebase where if you don't know what the name of the

"The APL & J examples aren't very enticing to me. I'm curious about them, but I wouldn't want to work in a codebase where if you don't know what the name of the function means, you can't figure out what it does." Is it possible that APL and J fail this test only because you (and I) don't know how to read APL or J? I think there are some languages that end up being difficult to read due to failings of the language, but I don't know enough to know if APL or J is among them. Python is, perhaps, more readable than most languages, but I've seen people learning Python have a hard time with many of its choices, so we really have to consider whether we find some version of the code more readable only because we've read a lot more of that kind of code. Most of the time "easy to use" just means "what I'm used to", and I don't think programming languages are an exception to that.

dahart 9y ago
> Is it possible that APL and J fail this test only because you (and I) don't know how to read APL or J? Yes and no. :) Its a great point; familiarity and practice is a big part of comfort and productivity, absolutely. I love playing code golf in Python. You can make Python very concise, and very unreadable. But I don't write professional code that way, and I definitely don't have a goal of making production code as concise as possible. Conciseness is good for very small projects, for the 5 minutes while I'm working in the code. Conciseness is awesome for Project Euler. Too concise, and when I come back to my own code days/weeks/months later, I can't understand it at all. Anyone who's coded for long enough on big projects will know the feeling of coming back to clean, well commented, semantically explicit code years after writing it, only to have no clue what it's doing or how it works. I also know how to read math, and math (typically... almost always) has this very problem. The conciseness is good for proofs and multi-step algebra, you need it while deriving things and working with the math. Once you codify it into a process, the conciseness is a big obstacle to understanding and code safety. I make lots of mistakes with math because it's too abstract. The mistakes are usually easy to fix because it's only a line or two at a time, but it'd be unworkable and unreadable if I had many thousands of lines of math the same way I have with regular code.
- avmich 9y ago
  A good example of a good approach working with J: http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10005770 http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10005770

dahart 9y ago

> Is it possible that APL and J fail this test only because you (and I) don't know how to read APL or J? Yes and no. :) Its a great point; familiarity and practice is a big part of comfort and productivity, absolutely. I love playing code golf in Python. You can make Python very concise, and very unreadable. But I don't write professional code that way, and I definitely don't have a goal of making production code as concise as possible. Conciseness is good for very small projects, for the 5 minutes while I'm working in the code. Conciseness is awesome for Project Euler. Too concise, and when I come back to my own code days/weeks/months later, I can't understand it at all. Anyone who's coded for long enough on big projects will know the feeling of coming back to clean, well commented, semantically explicit code years after writing it, only to have no clue what it's doing or how it works. I also know how to read math, and math (typically... almost always) has this very problem. The conciseness is good for proofs and multi-step algebra, you need it while deriving things and working with the math. Once you codify it into a process, the conciseness is a big obstacle to understanding and code safety. I make lots of mistakes with math because it's too abstract. The mistakes are usually easy to fix because it's only a line or two at a time, but it'd be unworkable and unreadable if I had many thousands of lines of math the same way I have with regular code.

avmich 9y ago
A good example of a good approach working with J: http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10005770 http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10005770