On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Björn Helgason <[email protected]> wrote:
> From the pages about eli " (J is both free and uses ASCII characters but it
> is more terse and difficult to learn than APL)."
>
> I do not share this view but many people do.
>
> I think it important to get rid of this notion.

Maybe? But I think it's a valid notion, for some people (not me!).

Personally, I find python and numpy to be much harder to understand
and work with than J. Stuff like 1 + 2 3 4 giving the result 3 4 5 is
much easier to work with than python's list compehensions and tuples
and other such complexities.

But my finding J easier to work with does not really matter - in part
because python is being used at the freshman level in a lot of
colleges. And I think that that came about because the python
community has a good sense of humor (the language, after all, was
named after a british comedy show). And also, to become proficient
with J you have to be comfortable with being ignorant about things you
have learned about. (Ignorance being the state of existence where you
can learn something as opposed to the more combative form where you
know stuff and are thus immune to further education - though that can
also be temporarily useful.)

That said, we could do with a lot more "fun" J examples. And/or
J+Javascript (jhs) examples. Or J+C examples. Etc. Maybe we should
have a wiki page describing how to make J save menu options also save
to github, or maybe dropbox? Etc...

Perhaps we should also create an "art" forum? But perhaps first we
should start publishing hobby/art/attractive code related to fun
things we can be doing?

Thanks,

-- 
Raul
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Reply via email to