Tracy Harms-3 wrote: > > "Deep down in their hearts, programmers want to read and write terse > code." So begins Gavin Grover in a blog he posted in June. In short > order, though, he qualifies that this is not true enough to amplify > the popularity of J. Why not? He never really develops much of a > theory, there, but it seems to boil down to it being possible to have > too much of a good thing. > > http://gavingrover.blogspot.com/2008/06/future-of-programming-chinese.html > > His basic idea here strikes me as very engaging, and perhaps sound. > If it is sound, I'm confident that the benefit is higher for the > Iverson language family than for any other languages, because here the > benefits of reducing names to pure symbols are maximized. > > You are certainly right that there is no theory given. What he wants instead is to use chinese-like UNICODE characters instead of english-like tokens in order to increase terseness. I see no difference between the two, and theoretically they are equivalent, but I must admit that many parts of the text are quite amusing. For instance:
> The K programming language, used by financial businesses, could be the > tersest language ever invented. It only uses ASCII symbols, but overloads > them profusely. However, the price is the inability to give different > precedences to the operators, so everything unbracketed is evaluated from > the right. > I'm still laughing. :D Another funny one is: > A terse programming language and a tersely-written natural language used > together means greater semantic density,[...] > I think he meant "greater graphic density", just like in: :D -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/G.-Grover-on-symbolic-naming-tp20389461s24193p20389943.html Sent from the J Chat mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
