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Playing with J (~ APL) certainly feels magical (though I can never remember the syntax a day later) and APL like Lisp gets a lot of leverage from a powerful vocabulary on a rich data structure (arrays and lists respectively). However the "One Great Datastructure" flattens the domain and doesn't self-document, nor constrain you from unintended uses, the way a rich type system does, so I find reading and maintaining Lisp (and I assume the same applies to APL) to be frustrating and tedious.

Writing this, I'm reminded how J felt full of "tricks" much like using Perl: there are these tricks you can use to get the result you wanted that isn't necessarily the most faithful expression of the problem.



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