Roger pointed out that: > J，是圖靈獎獲得者肯尼斯·艾佛森和許國華(Roger Hui)於九十年代初發明的一 > 種程式語言，是APL語言 (亦是由艾佛森所創) 、FP、FL函數編程語言的繼承者。
is more compact than its English counterpart: > The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Ken > Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL (also by Iverson) and > the FP and FL function-level languages created by John Backus. You know, I once had a similar feeling about English vs Spanish. I am barely literate in Spanish, but I know enough to read the signs on the subways. And, sometimes having no better option on my commute, that's what I do. And what I noticed was that where the English was to the point (more or less), all the Spanish was more than a mouthful. I don't mean it's difficult to voice, I mean that the Spanish used a lot more words to get around to the same idea. After a brief and silly moment of national pride, it hit me. The Spanish wasn't long winded because of an intrinsic feature of the language, it was long winded because it wasn't Spanish. It was English, crammed into Spanish. All the Spanish signs were basically transliterations (NOT translations) of the originals in English. Most signs, in fact, came in pairs, or in two parts (the leftmost in English). Someone, somewhere, is making a fortune as the guy who "translates" subway ads by typing them into http://babelfish.altavista.com/ . * All this is to say that a language is more than its dictionary. A language is inextricable from its culture. It is an indwelling. Each culture, given its history and circumstances, is going to have a set of concepts which are easier to express (more succinct) in its language than they would be in others. I'm sure I could come up with phrases that are short and easy to express in English, and I could finish saying them in English before Jose could in Spanish or you in Chinese. But you wouldn't feel too bad, because they're be very specific, constrained, "Englishish" ideas which don't have much relevance in your languages. And you could do the same to me. Similarly for one-symbol-per-concept. Of course that's going to be more succinct; so long as you already have the concept. If you don't, you're going to end up stringing a bunch of symbols together to get around to the idea.** By the way, how do you say "Englishish" in Chinese? -Dan * This is basically the same problem we have with the Alioth benchmarks. They want us to write C in J, and it comes out cumbersome and ugly. The results are something no one fluent in J would want to read (nor would admit to writing). ** And of course this is a spectrum. There is a tradeoff succinctness and extensibility (composability) in pictographic vs alphabetic languages (I wonder where German falls on this curve, with its sentences-in-a-word). And similarly in computer languages. Machine code is the most extensible, but least expressive. C is more expressive but less extensible. And J further still. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Subject%3A-Re%3A-J-readability-tp14430048s24193p14447353.html Sent from the J Chat mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
