I don’t have anything to intelligently contribute except that I’m super excited to see this. J for years has been top of my ‘fuck it, I’m just gonna move to the Andes and learn a bunch of programming languages’ list. I’ve never really internalized its control flows and idioms. And I’ve never really made the conceptual leap from how I would use it to do statisticy stuff to how I would use it to build, like, business logic and servers and stuff. But even if mastery meant it became a really powerful desk calculator I still want to conquer it.
I was curious too. I’m guessing he’s referring to the preamble?
As a broad rule, once ‘pure’ lines exceed around seven or eight characters, it is usually better to consider defining a new named verb or adverb, if necessary building up a chain of mixed new names and J primitives to achieve a final overall objective.
I don’t have anything to intelligently contribute except that I’m super excited to see this. J for years has been top of my ‘fuck it, I’m just gonna move to the Andes and learn a bunch of programming languages’ list. I’ve never really internalized its control flows and idioms. And I’ve never really made the conceptual leap from how I would use it to do statisticy stuff to how I would use it to build, like, business logic and servers and stuff. But even if mastery meant it became a really powerful desk calculator I still want to conquer it.
Also, love the pun.
I’m a few chapters in and it’s fantastic. The eight character rule and the
f~gconstruct alone would be worth paying money for!What is the eight character rule?
I was curious too. I’m guessing he’s referring to the preamble?
Yup, that’s the one. I’m not sure whether I should be thinking of it as raw characters or primitives, but either way it’s a useful heuristic.