On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 12:03 AM, neville holmes > My tack was that the tacit style is the purest imaginable > (to me at any rate) mode of functional expression and my > experience was that the students agreed and coped very > well, though they always went back to what they saw as > the more expressive (I disagreed) coding styles as in > Basic (ouch!) and C (shrug!) for example. > > The core issue seems to be whether you are tackling > a calculation or facing up to a massive system. I held > the opinion that tacit J was basically calculation and > that connecting to files and databases was peripheral. > > However, there are problems in calculating with tacit J. > I recently put an essay in my Computer column describing > a device I called the formulator (see > eprints.utas.edu.au/9474) that was based om my experience > teaching tacit J (though that essay doesn't explicitly say > so).
I agree with you that tacit expressions can be very nice to work with. I also agree with your statement that there are problems with it. Though, personally, I think that these problems were explicitly designed into it and I think that that means simply that it is not suitable for everything. Tacit J is a great tool for concisely expressing certain kinds of calculations. However other kinds of calculations (including, especially, calculations with too many data sources) are better expressed as explicit calculations [or, in some cases, are better avoided entirely]. A related issue, though, is expressing the purpose and domain of the vocabulary. You can get a lot of mileage here with well chosen names, and with good examples. But (especially in large programs), some explicit notes about a block of code's purpose or usage can be essential for some people. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
