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Well-chosen symbols aid thinking about the concepts. That's why mathematicians don't write their formulas in ASCII. Once you learn the keyboard layout, it is fa
by abrudz 4y ago
Well-chosen symbols aid thinking about the concepts. That's why mathematicians don't write their formulas in ASCII. Once you learn the keyboard layout, it is faster to type APL than J's two-glyphs and three-glyphs.
- __rito__ 4y agoKen Iverson invented J after he worked on APL and according to him J is an improvement upon APL. Most people don't know about J, but know about APL because of those weird symbols. I agree with your thoughts that not everything should be ASCII (and this is what many comments on this thread don't see), but don't reach the same conclusion as you do.
- abrudz 4y agoThe core language of J was an improvement on the APL back then, but modern APLs have since borrowed many features from J. Iverson's choice of ASCII was because he wanted to make it more accessible to schools that couldn't get the equipment necessary to display APL glyphs. Note that J was released the year before Unicode.
- ssfrr 4y agoThe use of ASCII was a concession to the state of technology at the time. I don't think he actually preferred the ASCII digraphs to APL glyphs.
- __rito__ 4y ago> a concession to the state of technology at the time. Well, not anymore. But I will prefer ASCII over glyphs any day. I have learned symbols in Math, and I keep learning newer ones. It finally comes down to _RoI_. The vast and tremendous return I get from non-ASCII characters in Math (and have gotten for decades)- I will not get the same amount from APL. It's as simple as that to me.