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I definitely agree with Hillel's prescription here. In a complex topic, you need different kinds of literature. For beginners, there is J for C Programmers, and

I definitely agree with Hillel's prescription here. In a complex topic, you need different kinds of literature. For beginners, there is J for C Programmers, and for experts there is NuVoc and the official dictionary. But for intermediate users who grasp the basic concepts, J and other APLs are harder than other languages because there seems to be a whole strategic aspect separate from the tactical aspect. It seems as though trying to figure out how to do something in APL based on experience with any non-APL programming language gives you a huge X-Y problem, where even you cannot even trust how you would decompose the problem. Relearning that after a dozen or so more conventional languages seems to be a significant cognitive barrier. This confrontation with an alien culture of computing seems to make us recoil in horror for the most part. But having been over that barrier with SQL and Prolog, I find it plausible that the APLs really do represent a more elegant approach to computation that just requires a much larger up-front investment.

avmich 8y ago
We have different perspectives here. I agree that J for C Programmers is good for novices, but I wouldn't say NuVoc is for experts. Next, J allows solving problem with different algorithms, and the choice you make among primitives reflects more what you want than what you can do - so the problem author is discussing seems rather odd, you can go many different ways, what do you mean "which way I'm supposed to go"? Yes, decomposing problem is different with APLs. No - believe it or not, after three days of meditation I've got enough understanding of J that makes the road from absent of major roadblocks. That wasn't and still isn't the case with supposedly easy Python - years of conventional languages like C, C++, Java etc. still allow me to struggle with Python - perhaps because I didn't have those days of meditations with it?
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  Python does encourage the perspective that there is a single right way to do things. This isn't necessarily true at the high-level, but at the low level of a handful of lines, it often is true. Like Hillel, I have often thought that my solution to a problem in J was good, only to see much shorter solutions from prominent J programmers. What makes it shorter is usually that there are direct but less obvious ways of doing things using the primitives. I have the experience of having a first look at things like grade-up and remembering it as a way of sorting, but when you see the various ways that grade-up is used in practice, there are a lot of uses for it that do not strictly have to do with sorting. This is in contrast to Python where lists can be sorted and that's all sorting does for you. I frequently forgot about the match builtin and would do convoluted things like equals with rank (0 1) and insert-equals or sum. There's more than one way to do things, but often beginner code is obviously worse.

avmich 8y ago

We have different perspectives here. I agree that J for C Programmers is good for novices, but I wouldn't say NuVoc is for experts. Next, J allows solving problem with different algorithms, and the choice you make among primitives reflects more what you want than what you can do - so the problem author is discussing seems rather odd, you can go many different ways, what do you mean "which way I'm supposed to go"? Yes, decomposing problem is different with APLs. No - believe it or not, after three days of meditation I've got enough understanding of J that makes the road from absent of major roadblocks. That wasn't and still isn't the case with supposedly easy Python - years of conventional languages like C, C++, Java etc. still allow me to struggle with Python - perhaps because I didn't have those days of meditations with it?

fusiongyro 8y ago
Python does encourage the perspective that there is a single right way to do things. This isn't necessarily true at the high-level, but at the low level of a handful of lines, it often is true. Like Hillel, I have often thought that my solution to a problem in J was good, only to see much shorter solutions from prominent J programmers. What makes it shorter is usually that there are direct but less obvious ways of doing things using the primitives. I have the experience of having a first look at things like grade-up and remembering it as a way of sorting, but when you see the various ways that grade-up is used in practice, there are a lot of uses for it that do not strictly have to do with sorting. This is in contrast to Python where lists can be sorted and that's all sorting does for you. I frequently forgot about the match builtin and would do convoluted things like equals with rank (0 1) and insert-equals or sum. There's more than one way to do things, but often beginner code is obviously worse.