> Despite my head start with J, by the end of the conference I found APL code easier to grasp – J seems more extreme to me. Roger calls J “executable mathematic

> Despite my head start with J, by the end of the conference I found APL code easier to grasp – J seems more extreme to me. Roger calls J “executable mathematical notation”, and I’ve always been a bit more of an engineer than a mathematician. I found this too, when I tried them both, first J then APL, perhaps because: * APL uses () [] and {} in their pairs to parenthesize things, just like other languages, while J uses the 6 symbols as standalones, harder to read the code. * All verbs in APL are single characters, whereas J symbols might be more than one. * J, unlike APL, uses the concepts of rank, and forks and hooks, which are both difficult to grasp and don't seem to add much to the array processing idea.