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When I tried out both J and APL a while back, I found the J symbols to be unintuitive compared to APL's, mainly because APL had balanced parens, brackets, and c
by vorg 12y ago
When I tried out both J and APL a while back, I found the J symbols to be unintuitive compared to APL's, mainly because APL had balanced parens, brackets, and curlies, whereas J didn't but instead used them unpaired as part of multi-symbol operators. APL operators were always single-symbol which also helped readability compared to J, but of course entering APL symbols was far more difficult than J's ASCII ones.
One of my favorite possibilities for a syntax that's terse but still readable as well as easily enterable is one using Chinese/Japanese Kanji. IME's like Cangjie or Wubizixing mean they can be entered easily without using unintuitive operators like (= or /] or {%
- brudgers 12y agoI think learning J is a project that will take more than 24 hours, not something that where naive intuition is going to produce significant progress...the documentation implies as much. It's Emacs not gedit. Then again, I don't think any powerful programming language is going to be easy to learn. Turing machines or lambda calculus, take your pick, are hard concepts when it comes to navigating all their implications. That's what allows them to capture all of computation. Python or Ruby or whatever may push the point where the power to complexity curve goes asymptoticly vertical a bit to the right, but it's still there and steep as a wall. J doesn't pretend to be English. It tries however to have a logical grammar that reflects the grammar of natural language rather than a vocabulary that does.