Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

I am convinced that the J programming language is an elaborate hoax. I just don't understand how anyone is falling for it.

View on HN

I feel the same way about Haskell and Monads.

It's true: everything you don't already intuitively understand is just a prank, and everyone who claims to get it is either a trickster or a mark. Isn't it fortunate that you already know everything worth knowing!

How are your Blub projects going these days?

That's ... quite the interpretation and projection from one throwaway line.

This!

The whole APL, the Turing prize, the Google which in the news in regard to that prize... All of them conspired.

Approximate quote from a C textbook: "Besides, C is actually the language made for programmers. Pascal is for students, Basic for housewives, Lego for schoolchildren, Fortran for scientist, APL for martians... Only C is for programmers." First time I saw APL I was suspicious - can it do anything in addition to matrix manipulation?

I do understand your concerns.

P.S. BTW, Dijkstra ones was asking Iverson if APL is actually Turing-complete, or something like that. Iverson produced a typical APL answer for a problem - which wouldn't say much to anybody who doesn't know the meaning of symbols. Just like reading in foreign alphabet.

The title of this article provides a good argument for "C being for programmers." Seems like for every language FOO there's bound to be between 1 and a-lot of tutorials and introductions 'FOO for C Programmers'. Most languages appear to have an inferiority complex when it comes to C, so they need to prove how much better they are...

More likely, new languages realize that they are the new thing and that (a naive mental model of) C is the established lingua franca of programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com