J Can be Readable

[klibertp]

I think being extremely succinct is one of J strengths. You can trade it for better readability, of course, but you don't really have to. As I read somewhere, J is meant to be read with the help of J system. You have at least two ways of visualising how expressions are parsed and once you know this (and it can be a little hard to figure out yourself in more complex J expressions) you can just execute bits of the expression to see what they do. With practice you start to see idioms (there are many in J cookbook) which reduces the number of parts of expression you need to execute.

I like J because it forces me to think differently and I don't mind spending extra time on writing and (trying to) reading it. I imagine in the production setting it would matter more, so I'm not saying that the second version of sudoku solver in the article is somehow "wrong". I just wanted to note that it's not absolutely impossible to use J in it's succinct, tacit form, both for writing and reading.

Anyway, I'm very happy that J gets some attention. It's a great language!

[nkurz]

I hadn't known that J had any Korean connection. Does it, or is this being used in the sense of "it's Greek to me"?

[bryan_rasmussen]

I think the author means Korean in that he can't read it. I don't believe Ken Iverson had a Korean connection in making it.

[skazka16]

The sense of "it's Greek to me". J is an extremely cool tool. We are preparing much better article about this language, which will be available very soon.

[wyc]

I think the author means Korean in the sense that complicated words and phrases are constructed from a simple alphabet.

[kenko]

That distinction between `while` and `whilst` is a humdinger.

[a3voices]

If your code couldn't be understood by an intern, you shouldn't write it.