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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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 → StrawberryFrog]

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...

[coliveira → StrawberryFrog]

The story says that to use the original APL you needed a special keyboard, because it used mathematical symbols that are not in ASCII.

J doesn't use any non-ASCII characters, however it uses ALL punctuation characters you can think of :-))

[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.

[PStamatiou]

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

hello world:

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

[wingo → PStamatiou]

    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)>

[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!

[bitwize]

Somebody hasn't tried Brainfuck or Malbolge.