
The World’s Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment - nreece
http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/The_Worlds_Most_Mind-Bending_Language_Has_the_Best_Development_Environment/14.html
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olliesaunders
> I highly recommend that all programmers learn J.

Really? How well? I played with J over a weekend and familiarised myself with
the gist of its philosophy, some time ago; enough to know how much time it
might take to learn J well. But I stopped quite quickly when I realised how
much time it would take to master. It's not impossible and the learning curve
isn't too steep, you can piece knowledge together quite nicely (I think) but
that curve is very long. I'm glad J exists but I'd really like someone to
explain to me why, and in a lot of detail, I should learn it if they are going
to make that suggestion.

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diiq
It's worth the read, if only for the reminder that _languages are programming
tools_. It's not enough just to have the right functions, a clear syntax. I
love me some snap-on wrenches --- they are the best in the world --- but I
need other tools, too! I'd never touch lisp if I didn't have SLIME, or python
without the standard library.

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jamesbritt

                     “>>  <<  Ndx Usr Pri JfC LJ Phr Dic Rel Voc !:  wd Help ”
    
    

... suggests this is not something I want to spend a lot of time on. Is
anything _supposed_ to be this arcane and unintuitive?

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StrawberryFrog
Comments say "J is just APL done in ASCII".

Which is odd really, since many other new languages e.g. java, and c#. have
source in Unicode. Yes, your class or method names can contain/be funky
Unicode characters.

~~~
sb
hi,

the comment is not meant in /that/ way; rather APL used special symbols for
representing functions/operations, i.e., it had its own non-ASCII character
set (google for details)

AFAIR, there was also a java programming puzzler with unicode in comments:
since the unicode support is (was? probably there have been some changes since
1.4 _footnote:1_ ) _beautifully_ added on top of the parser you can get
seemingly strange errors from the parser/compiler. (please google for details,
too)

 _1_ : please correct me if that is not true anymore, has been quite a while
since i read the puzzlers...

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coliveira
I tried J a few weeks ago and was really delighted. Since then, I have spent a
few hours learning the many verbs (the way they call built in functions). It
is really a great experience.

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PStamatiou
ah i thought this article was going to be about brainfuck (esoteric as
esoteric gets..).

hello world:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

~~~
wingo

        scheme@(guile-user)> ,L brainfuck
        Guile Brainfuck interpreter 1.0 on Guile 1.9.2
        Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
        
        Enter `,help' for help.
        brainfuck@(guile-user)> ++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.]
        Hello World!
        brainfuck@(guile-user)>

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desu
Well, I was interested enough to download and run the OSX version. Fails with
some library issue, even tried off the disk image which the help says can be
done.

I'm sure it's great but not exactly a good first impression for this mac user!

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bitwize
Somebody hasn't tried Brainfuck or Malbolge.

