The learning curve is pretty steep, and with all respect due this group,
there is not yet a Paul Graham who has both the chops to get rich using
the tool, and the literary skill to enthrall people on the subject.
Personally I am a novelty seeker. I liked Lisp, but was unhappy with it
as a numerics language (though it is quite capable of doing a good job
here). Never would have tried it if it were not for the eloquent Paul
Graham essays. I suspect a lot of people are like that. I daresay there
would be no Clojure or F# without Paul Graham. With J, I got lucky. I
was trying to build a mousetrap in Lisp, and someone smarter than me
pointed out that it would be a lot easier in J, and a lot of other
things became super easy as well.
The main downside to such languages is ... using popular languages after
fooling around in a lisp or in J feels like going from a Porsche to Fred
Flintstone's car with cement wheels. Upside is, you can often find APL
or Lisp in a decent programming environment. Like learning latin.
On a related topic, Kevin Lawler (author of Kona among other things)
pointed this course out to me the other day; a course on approximate
solutions to computationally hard problems taught in K. Man, I wish I
had taken such a course, taught in K or J. It looks mind melting.
http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/CSCI-GA.2965-001/
-SL
> I'm not being rhetorical here but how would I have learned of array
> languages if I hadn't had mental machinery (makeup?) to set aside my
> biases/prejudices and give a new idea a decent chance (apparently this is
> hard in itself!!! who knew??)??
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