Hi Joseph I have to say I don't know APL very thoroughly, but here are some things I like J for that APL doesn't have (someone please correct me if I'm wrong):
- It's open source and free (Dyalog isn't, although there are open source GNU APL and NARS2000). - It works even on your phone (at least mine, android and ios/ipad). This combined with a nice keyboard (my favourite is messagEase) is bliss for impressing friends (I guess this depends on your friends :p). - There's very powerful tools for learning I haven't heard of in APL contexts: the addons debug/dissect, trace, tte, the interactive labs. - It has a very powerful system of automatic inverses (called obverses, since they are not all 100% inverses), for instance, p: y finds the y'th prime. p: inv y finds the index number of prime y (inv being a standard library adverb defined as inv=: ^:_1). This combines well with the under conjunction &. . For instance, ever wondered what first 10 primes after 1e6 are?: ((i.10)+])&.(p:inv) 1e6 will tell you. You can as well assign them using the obverse conjunction :. to overwrite one or define a new one, based on your use case. - There's a very cool addon for doing calculus on J functions: derivatives (also partial), integrals,… : math/calculus. - There's many more built-in primitives in J to pick from, like p: and q: for primes and prime factoring, p. and p.. for polynomial and polynomial derivative, C. and A. for handling permutations, and so on. This comes in handy when doing e.g. code-golf, or participating in adventofcode. That's actually how I ended up learning J. - If you're looking for an "academic" challenge, I guess you will find the tacit trains that were reintroduced in j903-beta u and later quite fun. I wouldn't jump to them at the beginning though, might be to confusing and you can perfectly do without. I'll leave the advantages of APL to people that actually use the language. Have fun exploring! Jan-Pieter On Tue, Oct 5, 2021, 23:35 joseph turco <[email protected]> wrote: > phew, that's good then! > > On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 5:18 PM Pierpaolo Bernardi <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 11:11 PM joseph turco <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > I am not trying to start a flame war, so please understand that is not > my > > > intentions. > > > > Don't worry about this. APL and J are friends, not enemies. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
