Here is what I posted in the RosettaCode discussion on "terseness"
Terseness has nothing to do with readability or understandability. Chinese ideograms provide one symbol for each complete word in the language, much like J or APL. Chinese text is extremely "terse" when compared to English, but I'm sure if you told a native Chinese that their language is harder to understand than English because it is too terse, they would disagree. Readability/understandability of any text is simply a function of familiarity, not terseness. The reason that many common programming languages are "readable" to many programmers, is because a specific language often uses constructs that are similar to other languages, for similar functionality. J sacrificed similarity with scalar languages for the higher goal of a simple, precise, executable notation. -- Teledon <http://rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=User:Teledon&action=edit&redlink=1> 1:46 1 September 2009 Hopefully that will help defuse the argument that terseness = poor readability. Skip Cave > Most of the "excessively terse" J code on RC is my fault. I actually wrote > up an email explaining why I prefer this format, but it disappeared in the > ruins of my failed HDD this weekend. > > I'll try to write it up again after I finish my migration to a new machine. > For now, I'll have to put RC on the back burner. Sorry for starting the > effort and then abandoning it. > > And sincere thanks to everyone who's contributed -- it makes a difference, > if only to me. > > -Dan > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
