Just as a note, this strawman: ([: – [: – [: – [: – ])
can (and should) be simplified to ] Moreover, I do not think "coolness" or "hotness" or "popularity" are all that good of reasons for using any language. Instead, I would go for "usefulness" and "expressiveness". Honestly, far too many technical decisions get made for the wrong (and often contradictory) reasons. But that's people for you, I guess. That said, I think J is great for experimental designs involving computation or where you are not quite sure what the architecture should be. But I also have had no problems taking the eventual result and translating it to some more installable language. Fortunately, that looks to be changing. But what first interested me about APL (and, later, J) is that it's just so incredibly useful for testing your understanding of some chunk of mathematics. You often do not know, when reading some odd bit of expression, what exactly the author was talking about. People, for whatever reason, seem to assume you know what they were thinking when they write things. And different professional contexts and different authors all bring different contexts to their writing. And most often the people doing the writing are not the people who are busy getting stuff done. So it winds up being a regular "tower of babel" with fragments of jargon mixed in and the useful parts often left out or implied, with artistic license used to paper over lack of observation, and ... so on. Anyways, if you don't test your understanding, you don't know if what you think you understand has any relevance to anything that works. And, often, it doesn't. Which is sad. Thanks, -- Raul On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 6:35 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > https://erlhelinfotech.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/jwithatwist-or-tacit-j/ > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
