I entirely agree, Bill. In fact my inspiration for raising the topic was hearing people (who don't know J) talk about what a programming language must be like in order for it to be good for functional programming. My hope is that the wider world of programmers will come to know enough about J, and enough about "functional" programming, that the suitability of J for such purposes will be generally recognized, if only vaguely.
It seems to me that this could happen with only a tiny increase in knowledge about J among functional programmers. It also looks like this change could improve the understanding of programming for a lot of people who care a lot about programming. The narrow conceptualization of "FP" that seems to dominate need not stay so narrow. Increased awareness of J can facilitate that correction. Noticing how J facilitates taking advantage of referential transparency, for example, can help people think of referential transparency without conflating it with the particular features of their favorite language, whatever that might be. However, such motion does not seem to come easily. I recently spent a fair amount of time corresponding on the topic of currying and its relationship to partial application and Haskell sections. What I came to think is that there is no easy mapping between the Haskell and J orientations toward currying. My experience has been similar on the topic of (Haskell/category theory) monads. Tracy On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 3:46 PM, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote: > I can see no one in this thread including myself suggesting J is weak > or in-efficient in solving 'functional programming' problems. I only > mentioned that J lacked features of 'functional programming' language > as that being taught in computer course 101. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
