3 ms·

> A better calculator language Well there are many of them like MATLAB, IDL, scilab, R and others. Python is verbose because it's not a calculator language but

• mjb 4y ago
  R is my go-to for this, and one I recommend often. It makes a nice calculator language (with only a little weird syntax), has a very rich standard library of functions, and is reasonably fast. The great thing about R is that it scales well with task difficulty. It works well for a couple numbers. Then you can use data frames, and the Tidyverse (https://www.tidyverse.org/ https://www.tidyverse.org/) packages to do a lot of data analysis (especially dplyr, which is extremely powerful). Finally, if you want to look at your data, the built-in plotting capabilities are solid, and ggplot2 is both extremely powerful and reasonably easy to use.
• O5vYtytb 4y ago
  Indeed, the example: > import math prod([math.factorial(x) for x in l]) No! Bad python! In J it’s just / ! l, quite literally an order of magnitude fewer keystrokes. I don't know anything about `match.factorial()` or `prod()` but I can deduce what it's doing. `/ ! l` is nonsense.
  • hwayne 4y ago
    I don't need you to be able to deduce what the J is doing. What I need is to write the computation as fast as possible so I can get the answer I need to know and then get back to whatever else I was doing. If I was writing something I needed to share with someone else, for sure I wouldn't use J!
  • rak1507 4y ago
    match? definitive proof that verbosity introduces bugs ;) (also you can't deduce what ! means? it's literally the factorial symbol)