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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'm missing the point: I think the notation is just fine -certainly nicer than regular expressions. You're just not used to it. Lots of people use K.

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No, you are missing the point. Take a page full of intense mathematical notation or an orchestral score and translate it into either full words (i.e.: "integral" in place of the integral symbol) or one, two or three character ASCII mnemonics. You should realize that the original is far more powerful a tool for communicating thoughts, ideas and the subject at hand than a seemingly random dump of ASCII on paper.

You did mention that you did not bother to learn APL. That's the reason you don't get it. I am trying to use mathematical and musical notation to illustrate the value of notation. It is obvious I am not doing a good job.

Let's just disagree and move on.

It's true that APL was originally designed as a notation tool, and maybe J fails at that, at least for beginners (which I am; only a few months in), but it certainly works very well for me as a language. Bonus; if my prop trading algos ever get lifted, there are only a few people who will be able to make anything of 'em. I see above you're looking at its successor, K. Maybe you will like it better, but ultimately the idea was to reduce J's character set to one-character per primitive.

If you read about the history of APL you'll see that Iverson developed the basic notation for the description of processors at a low level.

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