Yes. and I remember an APL program neither I nor anyone else available
could understand. Terse code, all one or two character variables.
Without any documentation whatsoever. With one for the customer very
annoying bug. After quite some time someone made an interpreter for the
output where he could patch it to get rid of the bug. /Erling
On 2014-07-14 00:43, Don Kelly wrote:
Absolutely!!
J suffers from the same problem as its precurser APL- in spades.. One
can write very terse code because of its power. Often, 6 moths later
the original writer has to spend time interpreting what was written. I
have come up with some terse code and , more often terse code from
others- all of which has been put in a utility script wrapped in
comments so that when I want to use it-I do have such guidance. This
is something one has to do to a great extent with any programming
language. It is even more important with J tacit.
Don Kelly
On 12/07/2014 11:44 AM, Don Guinn wrote:
Readability depends on a person's background. I can't read Chinese. Does
that mean it's not a readable language?
When writing a program or a document one must assume some level of
knowledge of the reader. J tends to assume readers have a greater
knowledge
of mathematics than most other programming languages require.
But readability is a real problem. What is usually missing from many
programs, especially J tacit, is the intent of something. Say I see
something like this:
< @ (({. + i.@{:)@[ { ] )
It would certainly help to have some idea what this is supposed to
do. What
its arguments are and what it returns. Documentation really helps.
But J expressions can be intimidating. It has always bothered me that I
could attack a FORTRAN program spanning several pages comfortably.
But a J
program of just a few lines which do exactly the same thing is hard
for me
to get into.
On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 12:23 PM, Erling Hellenäs
<[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi all !
Yes, maybe we should all be concerned about writing readable code
instead
of the shortest and most cryptic code? Maybe we should also write
writeable
code? Find a way to write that allows us to get the expressions
right the
first time?
J is more of a notation than a language? The value of a notation is
determined by clarity, but also readability? Maybe readability and
writeability, in the sense I explained above, should get higher
priority as
design goals for our future J?
Cheers,
Erling Hellenäs
On 2014-07-12 07:40, Raul Miller wrote:
I would not generalize to higher rank arrays without a model of why
I'd be
using them.
In other words, v=: {"_1 |:~&0 2 is probably good enough.
There are some interesting contradictions here - while one needs to be
comfortable thinking mathematically to get decent performance out of a
system, usually what we are building is a mix of instant and delayed
gratification and we usually assume our audience has no direct
interest in
the math we are performing (indirect interest, yes - sometimes).
Often I think we go overboard, and we should throw back in some
exposure
to
some of the more robust concepts (especially for the kids, so they
have
something interesting to play with). But professional adults tend
to be
under a lot of time pressure, and as a result their needs often
seem to be
a mix of the very basic and the childish.
Meanwhile, it seems like anything worthwhile takes time and effort.
Anyways, professional software design often centers around use
cases and
similar models which are aimed at extracting the important concepts
about
what people need to get done and how they want to work. And that
kind of
information is what you need if you are going to properly generalize
application code.
Thanks,
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