I, too, read a fair amount of code. Some of it is for work, but with J, it's more for pleasure. I really enjoyed gathering code examples for my talk and spending some time explaining how they work. The "Extracting Minors" example to which Dave Lambert referred me - on the "outfix" page at http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/d431.htm - alerted me to the power of "\." and provided a good example of the usefulness of a higher-dimensional array.
It makes me think, per Joe Bogner's request, that there's a good book waiting to be written about array-oriented thinking. On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Roger Hui <[email protected]>wrote: > I disagree. You can call it reading, or call it decoding, or call it > reading carefully, or ... . To me, it's still reading. > > So how often do I read programs? Every day. Most hours of every hour that > I spent programming. Most often, it is a program I have written myself. > When I write a program I try to write the best that I know how, because if > I don't, I know that I will have trouble reading it later. > > My primary means of debugging is reading. My primary tool for optimization > is reading. (Well, perhaps not, but reading would rank just behind > thinking.) > > An example of code reading, or at least presenting the result of such > reading, happened in the J Forum last month: > http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/source/2013-December/000525.html . I > probably have not looked at the code for years before looking at it again > (reading it) last December in response to Raul Miller's request. > > > > > > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > I've already weighed in with a (largely ignored) minority opinion on this > > discussion on Slashdot - > > > > > http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/01/21/1847217/code-is-not-literature- > > that's based on this essay: > > http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ . > > > > Personally, I've always viewed Knuth's push for "code as literature" with > > considerable skepticism and this essay by Peter Siebel re-enforces my > > skepticism. > > > > On a related note, check out the contribution from Dan Bron I plan to > > include in tonight's talk: > > > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DevonMcCormick/StatisticalCorrelationInWords > > . > > > > -- > > Devon McCormick, CFA > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
