On Mon, Nov 2, 2015, at 05:10 PM, Joe Bogner wrote: > On Nov 2, 2015 2:34 PM, "Wendell P" <[email protected]> wrote: > > eventually decided to go with K/Q because Arthur Whitney has done an > Hi Wendell, can you elaborate on a few of the points you made? > 1. How do you see K as a simpler language than J? > 2. What facilities for data manipulation are you referring to and what > would a library in J provide?
Although at first glance K looks similar to J, it really is not an APL, since it is based on lists rather than arrays. Most of the simplifications follow from this. There is no shape, rank, and boxing. Syntax is cleaner for list operations and control structures. Functions have more conventional syntax and can take arbitrary number of arguments. I don't think much could be done with J in this regard, except maybe some small cleanup in the syntax and naming conventions. As for expanded capabilities, I was mainly thinking of two features that are very nice for handling text, dictionaries and the ease of processing uneven lines. All that said, I would use J if the libraries I need were already built, since I practically have to start from scratch with K/Q. Although traditional APL culture has been all about custom tools and there doesn't seem to be much interest here, I think machine learning could be a big opportunity for J. Although R and Python are now popular, data sets are so big that running time is a major concern. An array language that is also fast would attract attention if a usable ML implementation were available. For general ML, I'm thinking of libraries like Scikit-learn, Weka, and Shogun. For text mining, the model library is Gensim. -- http://www.fastmail.com - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
