Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > 1. The small dots used for modifying the base ASCII characters in J are > hard to read, and can cause confusion. Making the characters bold can help, > but only on a computer. When writing J on paper or on a blackboard, the > small dots still often get lost in the mix. Having to darken each dot as > you write it, tells me that you need a better symbol set for writing J. > This may not be an issue for J programmers, but it is an issue for J > teachers.
I don't know if this is true. However, I don't know how to test it. I think the bigger problem is probably the large primitive set, rather than the dots. If we'd used prime and double-prime the problem would, I think, still be there, even though prime etc. are much bigger punctuation. > 2. Unlike most APL symbols, many J symbols don't have any graphical cue to > their function. That is one of the reasons the J learning curve is so > steep. I just don't buy it. I tried APL and gave up; I've found J no harder than any other language I'm lazy about. APL's learning curve is extremely steep because you have to use symbols that you don't know how to say or type. At least you can speak and write J... But I'm not sure about my position there. > J newbies have to > memorize 120-some symbols, most of which don't provide much of a clue as to > their underlying functionality. Of course, there's a lot of truth in what you say. I'm sure you're right that providing glyphs that give SOME clue of what they do will help. You're convincing me :-). > 3. Groups of J primitives which have graphical similarity, don't > necessarily have similar functionality ($ $. $:). So this makes it > doubly-hard to remember what each symbol does. Straight-up true. > All this negativity isn't meant to imply that Ken & Roger did a bad job of > picking the J symbol set. They did a marvelous job, given the limited > options for entering symbols, and the ASCII characters they had to work > with, in the 1980s. They gave up the elegance of single-glyph APL, for the > pragmatic rationale of cross-platform support. The main point now, is that > the limitations they faced back then that forced their choice, are now > fading away. We should also admire K's elegance in this domain. I didn't bother learning K (it's not open source), but it seems to use overloading to allow the same symbol to do different things to different types of data. (I'm not certain.) > Various suggestions have been proposed in this forum to address one or two > of these issues, but I haven't seen much to address all of them. We simply > need to take fresh look at the symbols J uses, realizing that the > limitations that caused those 1-2 character ASCII symbols to be there, have > gone away. I don't think anyone HAS tried to address all the weaknesses; but I don't think that's possible at our current state of understanding. I disagree that the limitations have vanished. > My current cellphone, a Galaxy Note 2, has a high-res graphics touchscreen, > graphic pen (with case insert), multiple soft keyboards, handwriting > recognition, built-in mike and speaker, GPS, inertial sensors, and on and > on. All the physical pieces are there to support all kinds of input > mechanisms and displays, for all kinds of characters. There is even an > Android OS option for selecting default soft keyboards for each specific > application, from a list of soft keyboards. Interesting--- on my old droid (Incredible 2) it allows switching keyboards, but not "per application", only one at a time. And I admit that the huge variety of inputs DOES suggest that it might solve some problems for us... But as things stand, my experience is that a phone is a very unpleasant way to do large amounts of input. I'm not really sure that your argument here is valid; I think you're assuming we're going to work miracles. No offense, I hope... Do you have any specific ideas? Perhaps the old Graffiti system would be like what you're talking about. Are you familiar with that? It was introduced on the Palm, in competition with the much more powerful and smart system used on the Apple Newton; and where the Newton was clever and smart, Graffiti was simple and reliable. Doonesbury never bothered to parody it, and it enjoyed relative commercial success until Palm died. Graffiti is still around as an Android keyboard replacement. > With the advent of ubiquitous graphical touch screens and soft keyboards, > along with handwriting and speech recognition functionality, the hardware > limitations that caused Ken & Roger to move away from APL's single-glyph > symbol set have been removed. So the time has probably come to revisit that > choice, given our new reality. I'm willing to look, but I'm not sure the only limitations are hardware. And I'm not sure a cell phone makes a good main programming machine -- mine makes a great calculator at best. To call touchscreens ubiquitous is ... not accurate. > Skip -Wm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
