I’ve been coding J for a while and occasionally (like most of us, I expect) Have Thoughts About It. I recently ran across a quote that triggered a few. Herewith.
“I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly (As I myself read.)” Thus Ludwig Wittgenstein, patron saint of J programmers. It is very difficult to get past the intuition that a line of code should take only a little time to absorb. But the intuition is flawed—when you read 3GL code, most of the content is identifiers—quasi-natural language documentation, in effect, and easily absorbed. A small fraction is function. (Particularly tacit) J, by contrast, is overwhelmingly function—the identifiers tend to be few. And because it does so much more, a “line” (the term seems both inadequate and disrespectful) of J will necessarily take much longer to absorb—that’s not an indictment of J’s obscurity: it’s a paean to its expressiveness. Wittgenstein would counsel patience when reading J, and so (perhaps self-servingly) do I. Sorry. Really felt I had to get that off my chest. Ed Sent from my iPad ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
