On 08/01/2016 09:24 AM, Raul Miller wrote:
Just as a note, this strawman:
([: – [: – [: – [: – ])
can (and should) be simplified to
]
Moreover, I do not think "coolness" or "hotness" or "popularity" are
all that good of reasons for using any language. Instead, I would go
for "usefulness" and "expressiveness".
I would not automatically discount popularity. Usually, the more viral a
language is, the more people there are working to improve it and the
faster it matures. Also, there are more libraries and better
interoperability with other languages and environments. All of which in
turn increases popularity. The question is which must come first, the
chicken or the egg?
Honestly, far too many technical decisions get made for the wrong (and
often contradictory) reasons. But that's people for you, I guess.
That said, I think J is great for experimental designs involving
computation or where you are not quite sure what the architecture
should be. But I also have had no problems taking the eventual result
and translating it to some more installable language.
Fortunately, that looks to be changing.
But what first interested me about APL (and, later, J) is that it's
just so incredibly useful for testing your understanding of some chunk
of mathematics. You often do not know, when reading some odd bit of
expression, what exactly the author was talking about. People, for
whatever reason, seem to assume you know what they were thinking when
they write things. And different professional contexts and different
authors all bring different contexts to their writing. And most often
the people doing the writing are not the people who are busy getting
stuff done. So it winds up being a regular "tower of babel" with
fragments of jargon mixed in and the useful parts often left out or
implied, with artistic license used to paper over lack of observation,
and ... so on.
Anyways, if you don't test your understanding, you don't know if what
you think you understand has any relevance to anything that works.
And, often, it doesn't. Which is sad.
Thanks,
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