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Of course APL is cleaner. But it requires a special keyboard. J tried to work around that, and flopped. The language need the aliases to be learnable.
by judk 12y ago
Of course APL is cleaner. But it requires a special keyboard. J tried to work around that, and flopped.
The language need the aliases to be learnable.
- eggy 12y agoThere are aliases built-in and you can define your own. Drop is built-in. To borrow an example above: 1 drop 1 2 3 4 5 NB. this is how to comment 2 3 4 5 NB. drop is }. in J Exactly how did it 'flop'? Popularity, or your understanding of it? Math symbols are cryptic, and Math is not popular, but I would not want to write: "The derivative of x with respect to t" everytime instead of, dx/dt everytime I needed to write a formula. I am sure beginners find 'for' ambiguous unless they have experience with programming as in 'for i = 1 to 10'. It's syntax you are highlighting, not meaning. People extoll the brevity of Haskell, and other functional languages, because they take the time to understand its syntax. J has been around a lot longer, and was created by some very smart people. I didn't choose it for its job market or popularity, but to expand my mind, and further my mathematics studies.