A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

Re:A look at the J language: the fine line between genius an... by gruseom on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:04PM (#4544701)

This has to be a joke

Everyone has this reaction when first exposed to this class of languages and their implementations - everyone. You're unfamiliar with the style, and you're confusing that with it being ugly/unreadable/dumb. I assure you it's anything but.

Now let's page silentbicycle and get him to explain :)

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Re:A look at the J language: the fine line between genius an... by argv_empty on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:26PM (#4544813)

You're unfamiliar with the style, and you're confusing that with it being ugly/unreadable/dumb.

I can't speak for GP, but I promise you I've spent plenty of time reading code with single-letter identifiers. If I'm going to have to actually understand some code, I'd much prefer descriptive names.

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Re:A look at the J language: the fine line between genius an... by jasonwatkinspdx on Thursday September 20, 2012 @12:26AM (#4546942)

While I personally dislike this style of c, you should know that j/k/apl style languages are focused around a very small number of operators. In this sense they are a mathematical notation (and in fact, APL was designed as a rationalized mathematical notation first, programming language later).

So the single character identifiers are not intended as something application specific, or mutable values. They are like +, *, %.

That said, I still think it's better to stick to the conventions of the implementation language when writing an interpreter, rather than attempt to contort it half way to your target language. If you want a self hosted implementation, just write a compiler.

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