Re: Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg88021] Re: [mg87994] Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?
- From: Murray Eisenberg <murray at math.umass.edu>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:27:04 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Mathematics & Statistics, Univ. of Mass./Amherst
- References: <fuhfdc$ihb$1@smc.vnet.net> <fuhrka$s88$1@smc.vnet.net> <200804211836.OAA09742@smc.vnet.net>
- Reply-to: murray at math.umass.edu
This comment about APL is quite wrong: nothing "compelled you" to write
"inscrutable single line programs" (except maybe in the earliest days,
when one was sending single lines over a telephone line to a mainframe,
then waiting for your instruction's turn to get its slice of time and
have the result sent back and typed at your terminal).
With APL then, and with IBM's APL2 now, you MAY, if you wish, write
overly condensed one-liners. And indeed some APL programmers aimed to
write as concise a program, all in one line, as they could possibly do.
But what some folks regard as inscrutable, others read with ease. It's
like saying that if one doesn't understand Chinese, then a couple of
pictograms form an "inscrutable" text, whereas somebody who does
understand Chinese finds it wholly scrutable.
What's more, many of the combinations of symbols in APL were instantly
recongnizable to any APL programmer as so-called "idioms".
The delight of APL was, and is, that many very complicated things can,
in fact, be expressed quite concisely, in a way that the suggestive
graphic symbols of APL help one understand.
In fact, one could maintain that, despite the power of its
pattern-matching, functional programming constructs, and list-handling
abilities, Mathematica programs can be MUCH more difficult to understand
than corresponding APL program -- because the Mathematica programs use
all those, often long, words, and because they force one to pay close
attention to order of precedence and to insert nested brackets.
It's really all a matter of what one has learned, and how well, and how
accustomed one is to the language. As just one rather simple-minded
example, suppose you want to form the running cumulative sum of a list
(in APL-speak, a vector) of numbers. In APL, this is given by
+\ vec
(and generalizes from to other binary operations). In Mathematica 5 and
earlier,
Rest[FoldList[Plus,0,vec]]
(also generalizable) and in Mathematica 6,
Accumulate[vec]
(a special function that's no longer generalizable).
The APL notation is related to the APL notation for summing a list,
+/vec
(which is also generalizable); the Mathematica analog is, of course:
Plus @@ vec
I think one would have a hard time proving that "+/vec" is more
difficult to read, especially at a glance, than "Plus @@ vec" -- or even
"Total[vec]". When I see "+/vec", I immediately think, "add up the
entries in vec".
I cannot speak knowledgeably of the current situation with APL2, but for
many years APL programmers were incredibly productive compared with
those programming in just about all other standard computer languages.
It's not for no good reason that, for example, major financial analysis
systems and reservations systems were written in APL (and some still
are, or at least in offshoots from the APL trunk).
AES wrote:
> In article <fuhrka$s88$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
> Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> it can be tempting to chain inscrutiably long commands
>> together and create an unreadable mess ---
>
> As was the case, oldtimers will recall, with IBM's APL ("A Programming
> Language"), which allowed you -- in fact, more or less compelled you --
> to write incredibly powerful, but totally inscrutable single line
> programs, leading to the now classic phrase "Write once -- read never",
> since one day later even the original coder couldn't figure out how his
> or her code worked.
>
>
>> together and create an unreadable mess --- but of course, if you did
>> exactly the same thing with the FullForm equivalents then the result
>> would be just as hard to read, if not more so.
>
> Don't agree with you on this -- but nonetheless will take your further
> comment to heart and go off and finally learn how to use @ .
>
--
Murray Eisenberg murray at math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts 413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street fax 413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305
- References:
- Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?
- From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>
- Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?