3 ms·

I do not disagree with your analysis (and I certainly do not have the experience to refute it), but I think you are overlooking some things. First, I think tha

by yiyus 6y ago

I do not disagree with your analysis (and I certainly do not have the experience to refute it), but I think you are overlooking some things. First, I think that J was indeed an improvement over APL. There were several irregularities in APL that were corrected in J (eg. indexing operations) and some new features that allowed new possibilities (eg: function trains and tacit definitions). This is discussed in more detain in "A Personal View of APL" (Iverson, 1991). And, second, there are some advantages of using ASCII. Although it does not require modifying your hardware any more, using a special character set still is inconvenient. The capacity to write a J expression in any mail program, for example, is important. Being able to use any keyboard (including mobile phone keyboard apps) is important. Easily adding J code to any paper using any text editor without needing special fonts is important. I do not think these advantages are enough to compensate for the loss of expressiveness, but they are not negligible. All that said, I understand (and partly share) your frustration.

robomartin 6y ago
I'll have to disagree. The primary motivation for J was that APL could not penetrate into mainstream software development because the world-wide installed base of IBM PC or clones simply could not deal with the character set without much mucking around. It went as far as having to purchase very specific graphics cards so that you could swap out the character ROM. BTW, when I say "graphics cards" the mental image should be a very primitive character-mode only VGA card that is stone age when compared with today's cards. In my experience it is difficult for non-APL-ers to truly understand just how bad it is to lose the symbols. The only approximation I have been able to find that clicks with some people is to compare it to musical notation. Anyone who reads musical notation understands the value of symbols very well. I can't relate to the idea of writing code on a mobile phone. I have never done anything that useful, even with my iPhone X. I barely want to reply to emails with it. I wrote a paper for an APL conference back in the dark ages. Printing the paper with APL characters as well as normal text entailed a double printing process where I had to change the ball on the IBM printer between APL and standard characters. I actually wrote a custom print program (in APL, of course) to manage the entire process and, of course, wrote the paper in APL using a custom text editor I wrote as well (Wordstar couldn't handle the task). Think of it as Jupyter Notebook (but not as sophisticated) for APL. Ah, the good old days when you had to create all the tools you needed yourself! Another way to look at it is: Had Iverson focused on advancing APL to the next stage, computer systems would have caught-up with the language. My guess is that the economic viability of his business forced his hand. I can understand this, of course.

by yiyus 6y ago

robomartin 6y ago

I'll have to disagree. The primary motivation for J was that APL could not penetrate into mainstream software development because the world-wide installed base of IBM PC or clones simply could not deal with the character set without much mucking around. It went as far as having to purchase very specific graphics cards so that you could swap out the character ROM. BTW, when I say "graphics cards" the mental image should be a very primitive character-mode only VGA card that is stone age when compared with today's cards. In my experience it is difficult for non-APL-ers to truly understand just how bad it is to lose the symbols. The only approximation I have been able to find that clicks with some people is to compare it to musical notation. Anyone who reads musical notation understands the value of symbols very well. I can't relate to the idea of writing code on a mobile phone. I have never done anything that useful, even with my iPhone X. I barely want to reply to emails with it. I wrote a paper for an APL conference back in the dark ages. Printing the paper with APL characters as well as normal text entailed a double printing process where I had to change the ball on the IBM printer between APL and standard characters. I actually wrote a custom print program (in APL, of course) to manage the entire process and, of course, wrote the paper in APL using a custom text editor I wrote as well (Wordstar couldn't handle the task). Think of it as Jupyter Notebook (but not as sophisticated) for APL. Ah, the good old days when you had to create all the tools you needed yourself! Another way to look at it is: Had Iverson focused on advancing APL to the next stage, computer systems would have caught-up with the language. My guess is that the economic viability of his business forced his hand. I can understand this, of course.