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People who know APL can read it. I've been dabbling in J and K off and on, and it makes sense to me, though I still need the dictionary. APL code looks dense an

People who know APL can read it. I've been dabbling in J and K off and on, and it makes sense to me, though I still need the dictionary. APL code looks dense and intimidating, sure, but so does a page of Chinese. Both use ideograms rather than words made of letters, but the APL vocabulary really isn't that large. You probably already know what + does. Also, I can't read Bosnian, but that says more about me than Bosnian. It doesn't make it a "write-only language".

derefr 16y ago
> Also, I can't read Chinese, but that says more about me than Chinese. It doesn't make it a "write-only language". On the other hand, the fact that the Chinese have put their language through several reforms because of systematic problems with literacy and reading comprehension does show that, on a continuum between "readable" and "write-only", the Chinese language leans more toward the latter.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  True, but I think you're focusing on the wrong aspect. (I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, then decided that the ideogram-rather-than-letters aspect was worth drawing a parallel to Chinese, and have since changed it back to Bosnian.) The parallels to actual human languages also break down here - reading APL is intimidating like reading Chinese, but it also has less than a hundred symbols (fifty-ish, IIRC), so it's really not comparabl in terms of "systematic problems with literacy and reading comprehension". I think the APL-languages are more like vi. Do vi(m) users think "9kdd2jp"? In writing, it looks like noise.
- gruseom 16y ago
  I don't think that follows. The causes could be primarily historical, for example. One would have to have detailed knowledge to make a case here.
lukev 16y ago
But Chinese isn't any more expressive, just shorter. The fact that you type "國" instead of "nation" is only lexicographically compact, not semantically. Studies show that proficient readers of Chinese do have marginally higher speed and comprehension than phonetic languages, but that doesn't translate into being more expressive. At risk of being slighty Euro-centric, in fact, from what little I know, western literature and tradition seems to have more emphasis on semantic content and the conveyance of literal ideas than does most Chinese.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  APL is also semantically compact, because every verb implicitly maps over a whole collection.* This interests me more than the whole "programming with wingings" bit, but that's the part people get hung up on. Like all those damn parentheses in Lisp, or the whitespace in Python. (Shrug.) I'm more interested in J, which limits itself to ASCII. * Joy also does this, but seems much less practical. Chinese is also not a great comparison, because the vocabulary is so large. I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, but changed it to Chinese because the "page with a grid of Chinese characters" is probably how most people think APL looks.

derefr 16y ago

> Also, I can't read Chinese, but that says more about me than Chinese. It doesn't make it a "write-only language". On the other hand, the fact that the Chinese have put their language through several reforms because of systematic problems with literacy and reading comprehension does show that, on a continuum between "readable" and "write-only", the Chinese language leans more toward the latter.

silentbicycle 16y ago
True, but I think you're focusing on the wrong aspect. (I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, then decided that the ideogram-rather-than-letters aspect was worth drawing a parallel to Chinese, and have since changed it back to Bosnian.) The parallels to actual human languages also break down here - reading APL is intimidating like reading Chinese, but it also has less than a hundred symbols (fifty-ish, IIRC), so it's really not comparabl in terms of "systematic problems with literacy and reading comprehension". I think the APL-languages are more like vi. Do vi(m) users think "9kdd2jp"? In writing, it looks like noise.
gruseom 16y ago
I don't think that follows. The causes could be primarily historical, for example. One would have to have detailed knowledge to make a case here.

lukev 16y ago

But Chinese isn't any more expressive, just shorter. The fact that you type "國" instead of "nation" is only lexicographically compact, not semantically. Studies show that proficient readers of Chinese do have marginally higher speed and comprehension than phonetic languages, but that doesn't translate into being more expressive. At risk of being slighty Euro-centric, in fact, from what little I know, western literature and tradition seems to have more emphasis on semantic content and the conveyance of literal ideas than does most Chinese.

silentbicycle 16y ago
APL is also semantically compact, because every verb implicitly maps over a whole collection.* This interests me more than the whole "programming with wingings" bit, but that's the part people get hung up on. Like all those damn parentheses in Lisp, or the whitespace in Python. (Shrug.) I'm more interested in J, which limits itself to ASCII. * Joy also does this, but seems much less practical. Chinese is also not a great comparison, because the vocabulary is so large. I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, but changed it to Chinese because the "page with a grid of Chinese characters" is probably how most people think APL looks.