A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)

Post by smabie » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #19

TurboHaskal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggled a lot too. I think the main issue is the problem domain in which these languages excel at. I like compilers, systems programming, distributed systems... but math? statistics? I'm admittedly terrible at that and find it really uninteresting. It doesn't help that most literature on J tries to teach its language concepts showing you how to solve math problems. I have no need for a fancy calculator. For what…

My general belief is that these languages would be far more useful as embedded languages; occasionally there is a need for the core of some complicated system to take advantage of their power, but the same design that makes them good at math makes them horrible for writing APIs or database access.

Post by leprechaun1066 » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #51

Verdex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I watched the video my response was that he was literally doing magic or that it was some sort of joke. Over time the video has become more approachable and I have a pretty good idea of what is going on. However, if I was asked to approach game of life in APL myself then I think I would still be pretty lost.

It's a kind of sleight of hand. It purports to be showing off the power of APL; what it's really showing off is the cleverness of someone who realized that the rules of Life could be expressed as a series of array operations. APL has a kind of mystique, but all it really is is a bunch of NumPy functions with a quirky DSL (of course, APL came first and heavily inspired NumPy). But we've quietly been doing the APL expe…

Post by eigenspace » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #58

eigenspace wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wish we had some better cross-platform solutions though, instead of cementing nVidia's hegemony. There's no technical reason why GPGPU should be any more difficult on AMD hardware. Then look no further than GPUCompiler.jl. Tim factored out all the platform agnostic parts of CUDA.jl (successor of CuArrays.jl and CudaNative.jl) into GPUCompiler.jl and that is now being used by the AMDGPU.jl package. It works tod…

Thanks! I had hit some of those pages before, but their ontology isn't immediately obvious, so thanks for the clarification. In particular I've definitely looked at AMDGPU.jl recently, but as the page says: "not all features (and especially performance) are up to par with CUDA.jl" - hence my impression of AMD being a second-class citizen. Still, it's great that we have anything at all, and I'm extremely grateful for…

Post by marmaduke » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #52

p1esk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your primary interest is in parallel code that runs on a GPU, and not autograd features of Pytorch/Jax, take a look at CuPy: https://cupy.dev/

That's extremely cool. Julia has something very similar, in the form of CuArrays [0]. I do wish we had some better cross-platform solutions though, instead of cementing nVidia's hegemony. There's no technical reason why GPGPU should be any more difficult on AMD hardware. [0] https://github.com/JuliaGPU/CuArrays.jl

Post by jodrellblank » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #19

TurboHaskal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggled a lot too. I think the main issue is the problem domain in which these languages excel at. I like compilers, systems programming, distributed systems... but math? statistics? I'm admittedly terrible at that and find it really uninteresting. It doesn't help that most literature on J tries to teach its language concepts showing you how to solve math problems. I have no need for a fancy calculator. For what…

My general belief is that these languages would be far more useful as embedded languages; occasionally there is a need for the core of some complicated system to take advantage of their power, but the same design that makes them good at math makes them horrible for writing APIs or database access.

    :If databaseResult.Rows.Count > 5
    :AndIf warnOnLargeData
        
        :For Row :In databaseResult.Rows

            logToFile 'Careful, that's a lot of data, e.g. ', Row[1]

        :EndFor
    :EndIf

          ⎕USING←'System' 'System.Collections'
          arr←⎕NEW ArrayList
          tmp←arr.Add ⊂'Test'
          tmp←arr.Add ⊂'Hello'
          tmp←arr.Add ⊂'World'
          arr[0 1 2]
    ┌────┬─────┬─────┐
    │Test│Hello│World│
    └────┴─────┴─────┘
          arr.RemoveAt 0
          arr[0 1]
    ┌─────┬─────┐
    │Hello│World│
    └─────┴─────┘