On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 1:00 PM, June Kim (김창준) <[email protected]> wrote: > You might be interested in reading this blog post: > > http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/notation-and-thinking/
I am always bemused when I hear people go on about how unmaintainable APL is -- that only its author can read it. My first computing job, before I even graduated college, was maintaining APL code that other people had written. A large part of this was tracking down race conditions (since it was a multi-user system). But it was a huge amount of code, doing a lot of hard tasks (for example: extracting text from the typsetting commands available from the GPO, based on a huge document on their typsetting standards which were mostly followed but not always, or, for example: quickly searching large bodies of text which were way too large to hold in memory). That application has largely been replaced nowadays, (by thomas.loc.gov, www.law.cornell.edu/uscode, google, and the internet), but my impression when I hear people say that APL is unmaintainable is that people like to say things without any real factual basis, just because they hear other people say the same thing. Personally, I had a considerably easier time maintaining APL than I have with C# (largely because with C# microsoft releases a new development environment every few years and sometimes dealing with development environment differences can eat days of time, but also because C# uses a compiler). Practical difficulties trump novice user issues, in my opinion. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
