I do not have as much difficulty seeing the challenges since I taught
APL to myself and to many others that you might consider "Dummies"
I am having some difficulties with J
Here are some examples:
1. The notation J layers many things in unique ways and they are not
completely documented. People with wide mathematical experience
will find it easier to discover how particular elements of J behave
than naive users. However explicit documentation could resolve this.
2. Reading requires recognition and many people give up when they
can't recognize things. People can learn to read many kinds of encoding
and can decode in many ways. For example a person may know that R E
A D encodes particular sounds and they might phonetically be able to
pronounce the word read in English but unless they understand that
read means comprehending the meaning of written symbols, that would
not help them to understand the word. On the other hand a speaker of
French might recognize the word READ to be a symbol that can translate
to the French word LIRE and from this might understand that READ
means "Pénétrer dans la connoissance de quelque chose d'obscur & de
caché"
There may be different nuances of READ and LIRE that do not map one
to one.
Reading the J word +. and consulting the documentation to find +.y
yields a two-element list of the real and imaginary parts of its
argument. For example, +.3j5 is 3 5, and +.3 is 3 0 .
might not be sufficient for some people to understand the nuances
of +. in J.
3. Mapping a symbol that you think you recognize to the wrong
concept can cause misunderstanding and confusion.
4. APL was simple in the following ways and J inherited some and not
other of these
(a) APL primitives were easy to distinguish from defined verbs, nouns
and variables. J uses ASCII symbols that blend into text.
(b) APL has one consistent syntax and order of operation (with some
anomalies introduced in various implementations to the detriment of
APL). J uses more complex syntax and grammatical forms.
(c) Primitives of APL did allow a level of abstraction that did
simplify underlying complexity. J permits you to compress complex
ideas but it is not necessarily by simplifying an underlying complexity.
5. As with any language, simplicity and elegance are produced by the
author and no matter, the reader needs experience and literacy to
appreciate such elements.
6. Language acquisition is different at different stages of human
development - there is a difference in your brain between how you
interpret your "mother tongue" or how you learn multiple languages as
a child or in latter years say through ESL (English as a Second
Language) classes. There are families of languages - Romance
languages like French, Spanish, Italian are similar and more readily
mutually understood. J and APL are as different from COBOL or BASIC
as Basque is to the French, Spanish, Italian neighboring languages.
7. Very often language differences are used to define a community,
to be understood by members and to exclude members. For those
interested you might find insight in the following:
How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it - by William
Labov, University of Pennsylvania
As I finally figured out, the Martha's Vineyard sound change was
serving as a symbolic claim to local rights and privileges, and the
more someone tried to exercise that claim, the stronger was the
change. This became my M.A. essay, and I gave it as a paper before
the Linguistic Society of America.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/HowIgot.html
OR
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis
OR
COMMUNITIES OF DIFFERENCE
Culture, Language, Technology
Edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas
Availability: Now In Stock
First Edition
From Palgrave Macmillan
Pub date: May 2005
256 pages
Size 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
$85.00 - Hardcover (1-4039-6326-6)
Also available:
$29.95 - Paperback (1-4039-6327-4)
8. Think of natural language. You might know the sound components
(phonemes) of a language but have a limited vocabulary. You might
learn an extensive vocabulary but misunderstand grammatical
construction. You might have no understanding of prosodic features
of rhythm, pitch, tempo, loudness that convey meaning in speech or be
unable to create written text that evokes these elements. Your
specific background and experience may not provide insight into
language used by another gender, region, class, occupation or other
factor bering on language use. You may not understand how certain
rules are bent or broken to produce special effects like poetry or
jokes.
Here is an exercise for those interested: Try to understand reading
better by viewing this site. It is a guide to writing Mandarin
Chinese in romanization.
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/chinese_adjectives.html
dly
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 25-Jan-07, at 1:27 PM, Björn Helgason wrote:
I guess I am beyond seeing what challenges a Dummy might face
trying to learn J.
I guess most of us are.
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