Not APL or J (I didn't know about them at the time), but similar principle.
I was asked to write a program to manipulate (what amounted to) symbols. I wrote the program in LISP (as I had heard of that). The guy I wrote it for said that it wouldn't do as he needed the solution in a mainstream language. I just looked at him, grinned, went away and got the code for a public domain LISP interpreter written in C and gave him that ... Plus the LISP program I'd written in the first place that I weasel-worded to sound just like a data file. That was fine :-\ (psfzt, tilt, does not compute ...) Stuart -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of bill lam Sent: 17 June 2006 4:57 PM To: General forum Subject: Re: [Jgeneral] Mathematica and its roots Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote: > are thousands of so-so C++ developers? A colleague of mine once had to > write a large and complex application in Excel using VBA. The first > thing he did was to build himself a library of APL-like functions and > operators... Then he wrote the add-in into this hybrid language. > Unsurprisingly it was at the same time efficient, relatively bug-free > and readable. But when I showed some people that it was possible to > write rank-independent code in VB, though it wasn't pretty, those > people cringed in fear. Is it the language's fault or the bad > training? I had similar experience, I was onced asked to help a friend to write a VB program for assignment. The problem asked to filter a string array using 2 criteria. I wrote some utilities in VB to emulate array operation in J, finally wrote equivelent of f1=. V1 data NB. f1: boolean vector for criteria V1 is true f2=. V2 data NB. f2: boolean vector for criteria V2 is true res=. (f1*.f2)#data NB. select according to both criteria met. I think this was quite simple, but the university's instructor gave the assignment a fail and commented he had never saw a worse program before. His comment was an entertainment to me but not to my friend. sorry to my friend. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
