I guess we can disagree on whether the bogging down is to be attributed
to J or to the user.
Two-dimensional programming languages have been talked about for at
least the 50 years I have been coding, and none has really taken off.
Just specifying such a language, never mind parsing it, would be a
challenge.
J at least has dissect, which gives a 2-D display of what a sentence is
doing. I haven't seen anything comparable to that elsewhere.
Henry Rich
J is a language for describing a computation. C/C++ is a language
for telling a computer how to execute a computation.
I like that distinction. But J seems to get bogged down in syntactic
issues. As a beginner I find it impossible to parse a moderately
sized tacit expression. No doubt one gets better at this, but like
all computer languages, the one dimensional space it lives in seems to
confound any attempts to represent mathematical ideas directly.
A computer language based on mathematical notation sounds like a cool
but impractical idea. It would to have to be 2 dimensional, as in
fact math notation is.
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