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The whole book is pretty good. After reading and applying the earned knowledge one wishes the book would be longer, with more material covered, but there are ot
by avmich 6y ago
The whole book is pretty good. After reading and applying the earned knowledge one wishes the book would be longer, with more material covered, but there are other books on J, essays and phrases on jsoftware.com, articles and forums - especially forums.
This book is quite suitable as a first book on the subject. It's a good reference, too, for basic mechanics; for style in organizing longer thoughts one would go besides the book.
There easily could be a few "aha" moments while reading. One could be in the discussion on verb ranks - then the words at the beginning, about the general commanding the army as a whole, becomes clearer. Another is a classification of loops - an unusual viewpoint for traditional C approach.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoI read it putting all of myself into it (even caught a couple of typos/bugs). I also read Iverson's. These languages (APL, J, K) promote a programming paradigm that sits somewhere in between the continuous spectrum between imperative and functional paradigms. There is lot of good to absorb from J, and not little of it has fortunately permeated into the famous Python's numpy library. Many people have been inadvertently using APL/J deepest concepts thanks to it. I do think that, even if they are beautiful, they are still generations away from a community Zeitgeist that would render as widely spread as, for example, Haskell.