I've not been keeping up with this list, so I just saw Dan Bron's post. I'll
play along, posting this before I read any of the replies.
The function returns primes returns a list of primes less than or equal to
one-plus-the-argument.
It took me about five minutes to read it. My thought process ran something
like this:
Hmmm, integers starting from two...
Oh, a multiplication table.
Strung out in a row. Must care about shape, not order.
Is this a hook, or a train of all forks? OK, a reflexive-copy hook at the end.
Ah! It excludes everything that exists as a product of two of the numbers, so
it returns a list of primes.
I think it is worth mentioning that I read this on my cellphone. In doing so, I
just looked at the program. No scrolling was required to look over the code as
a whole. Most other languages would not have that advantage, which I think
must count when judging readability.
On the general topic of readability, it would be nice if the presumption were
not necessarily made that the reader is fluent in English. Although I happen to
be in the crowd of programmers who benefit from programming languages being
built from English, I don't think that's a premise that can be fairly assumed.
J is excellent insofar as neutrality of natural language becomes a criterion.
--
Tracy B. Harms
A good programming language is a conceptual universe
for thinking about programming.
Alan Perlis
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