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To some APL and J are the equivalent of C to assembler. It is not obfuscated, it is concise: brief but comprehensive, and easy to understand if you take the tim
by eggy 7y ago
To some APL and J are the equivalent of C to assembler. It is not obfuscated, it is concise: brief but comprehensive, and easy to understand if you take the time to learn it like you would other PLs. I think Ken Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" covers this pretty well [1 PDF].
[1] http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pdf http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pd...
- okareaman 7y agoThank you, that's a fascinating article and I'm going to finish reading it, but I'm ot arguing against languages that are designed to be terse and expressive to a certain mode of thought, but rather languages like JavaScript that are not designed to be terse and are deliberately made so at the cost of readability. I just don't find it interesting. It does not follow that the resulting machine code is faster or smaller, so I don't see the point beyond playing a game with language.