On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Don Watson <[email protected]> wrote: > Tacit J and the verb compositions, including forks and hooks > have significant advantages. However, there is one question that > really puzzles me. > > When longer trains of verbs (and other language components) are > created in Tacit J, why is the fork/hook grammar better than > right to left grammar? > > I haven't come across any explanation of the reason for the > change in grammar. > > Don
I am probably the last person on this list who should pipe in here. I have been dabbling with the language for about 2 years now. Previously, I had spent 30+ years using computer languages, 20 of them professionally, mostly in what I lovingly refer to as "the bottom-feeding world of business app development". I have used C, C++, perl, Java, php, javascrpt.. all the predictable suspects and then some. I discovered J by accident, the subject of another post for another time. As I spent my first few hours fooling around, getting it do "something" I, I was gradually overcome by a sense of awe.. I wasn't sure what was going on here, but I was pretty sure that I had been working *way* too hard for the last 20 years. When I encountered train syntax, my first reaction was that it was the most arbitrary, academically-inspired nonsense I had ever seen.. but I was determined to grasp the syntax as I could see those patterns popped up a lot. As I struggled to rephrase my ideas into terms that I could grapple with in J, refactoring them down into the apparently arbitrary construct of the tacit train, it became apparent to me that nearly all of my logical constructs developed an inherent elegance to them in this form which was not obvious to me at all as I formulated the idea. I spent the next several months writing silly little programs, exclusively in tacit J until gradually it became second nature... I rarely use explicit J (but then again, I have no products in J) Others can better describe the formal properties of the train that lend it such power and elegance but I can tell that now, to me, every problem looks like a train. My work in 'conventional' languages has benefited as I see old algorithms in new light. -- - michael dykman - [email protected] - All models are wrong. Some models are useful. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
