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User talk:Dkf: Difference between revisions
Terseness doesn't mean unreadable
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:: Of course as has been pointed out, you first have to learn the language. In the case of [[J]] (and APL), "learning the language" means just that (vocab, grammar, etc.), not just syntax. That doesn't mean it takes forever to gain any proficiency - just like any human language, you can usually get a lot of things done even with a limited vocabulary. --[[User:Tikkanz|Tikkanz]] 23:13, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
::: Terseness has nothing to do with readability or understandability. Chinese ideograms provide one symbol for each complete word in the language, much like J or APL. Chinese text is extremely "terse" when compared to English, but I'm sure if you told a native Chinese that their language is harder to understand than English because it is too terse, they would disagree.
::: Readability/understandability of any text is simply a function of familiarity, not terseness. The reason that many common programming languages are "readable" to many programmers, is because a specific language often uses constructs that are similar to other languages, for similar functionality. J sacrificed similarity with scalar languages for the higher goal of a simple, precise, executable notation. -- [[User:Teledon|Teledon]] 1:46 1 September 2009
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