How To Choose Betwen APL And J

Where is the better place to start APL or J?

Raw notes follow.

• Comments (some summarized) from the references
  • J’s biggest feature over APL is tacit form which addressed Iverson’s biggest issues with APL
  • APL’s distinctive syntax
  • J is now GPL3
  • J is fuly fledged Function and Object-Oriented
  • J’s great documentation, forum and community
  • “J, added a plethora (called adverbs and conjunctions), but removed brackets (both axis and indexing), the each operator (in favor of the more general rank operator), and last-axis (cumulative) reduction.”
  • “If the [J] had been designed in a way that made it easy to use it probably would have been one of the most wildly successful languages in history.”
  • “A line of J could replace a page of just about anything else. In any other language, your brain ain’t working half the time; instantiating things, making iterators go, building brain dead switch statements, dealing with preposterous function call overhead or declarations, writing dumb helper patterns that are a tiny variation on something you have done 100 times before.”
  • J should be considered a language completely unrelated to APL

Resources

• APL versus A versus J versus K?
• APL and J
• (A Different Post Titled) APL and J
• A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity
• How similar are J and APL?
• J for the APL Programmer