[Jprogramming] J v Python

[William Tanksley, Jr]

Boyko Bantchev <boykobb at gmail.com> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr <wtanksleyjr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've done some classroom teaching and small-group tutoring, and it is
>> not my experience that traditional algebraic notation is easy for kids
>> or college students to learn.
> I am not foreign to teaching, and my experience contradicts yours,

I'm surprised almost to the point of disbelief. One hypothesis that
might explain our divergent experiences is to suppose that unbeknownst
to me, mine was almost entirely with especially disadvantaged people
-- I taught Algebra 1 and 2 at a community college, so the people I
saw would tend to have taken and failed at Algebra once already. If
that's the reason, I'm also severely subnormal, since I also had a
hard time, as did all the people I knew growing up. And all the people
I've ever talked to about it, including several accomplished
mathematicians.

It's actually a LOT easier to assume you're pulling my leg than it is
to believe you. Am I just holding onto a false impression of my own
sanity? Let me know -- where did you teach that gave you the idea that
people find traditional notation easy?

> but the point to which I wanted to bring attention in my post was
> not this.  It was that J, as a notation and a computational model,
> is much harder to cope with than traditional notation.

That statement, unlike the one above, is obvious rubbish. "Traditional
notation" is incomplete to the extent that simple operations like
function composition aren't defined, and each abstract algebra text
has to define its own notation. The only thing traditional notation is
at all useful for is the very basics of rational arithmetic. Even a
simple extension of the rationals like complex notation has variants.
Moving into abstract algebra, no author attempts to use "traditional
notation" anymore; there's simply no tradition to uphold.

And ... computation? Here your statement falls dead. There is no
traditional notation for computation; there's no possible reading of
your statement that makes sense.

In addition, traditional notation has a weakness that's inherent to
the fact that it's traditional -- it wasn't designed for easy input
into or output from a computer.

-Wm