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This is an interesting post, but I think it should have mentioned the point that GoL is a tour-de-force to show off what is possible in the language, but it's n
by inimino 5y ago
This is an interesting post, but I think it should have mentioned the point that GoL is a tour-de-force to show off what is possible in the language, but it's not what the language is mostly used for. Most people using J or APL will just be getting some statistics out of large tables of numbers, or simulating something. So it's a little unfair to criticize the language for not being well suited to the problem. It's an extreme example of something well beyond what you would normally see written in that style.
- jaggirs 5y agoIt doesn't. It says it is well suited for GoL, but not for slightly different problems.
- inimino 5y agoI think the implicit criticism is that it is not suited for similar real life problems, because you never know if you have some problem for which it is well suited or some nearby problem for which it's not until after the fact. This is surely true, but I think as criticism it misses the mark because nobody seeing a problem of similar complexity to GoL should say "I know! Let's write a one-liner in APL!" The fact that it's possible at all is what is impressive. It's a little like if someone wrote a post criticising Ruby on Rails by writing a game engine in it, and then pointing out that it's slow.