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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

I have been wondering if there are dialects of J that sacrifice brevity but retain the computational model. I do not know J but the way I understand it, it would be rather easy to develop two-way translation.

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You can do this in J; nobody does. It would probably be more approachable to many people to write:

    mean =: sum reduce div size

Than:

    mean =: +/ % #

But less of your program fits on the screen at once, so you don’t have as broad a view. Then again, people who haven’t used an APL dialect won’t know what they’re missing anyway.

Whence this assumption that filling your entire screen with characters is helpful for understanding your program?

These operators are like the word "whence": a denser notation that could just as easily be written out in full, in a way more friendly to non-experts in the language - for example, as "from where" - but if you're already an expert thinking in terms of these dense operators, why not write that way? It's only natural.

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