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Notation as a Tool of Thought
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#12I like the idea that notation is a tool of thought, but I think that J (and APL) are actually rather crappy notations. I FAR prefer matlab for matrix work, as it is closer to actual math than any other language I know. For logic ish programming, Prolog or AMPL or SQL (I like SQL, even though people hate on it all the time). But, in my humble, J and APL are interesting historically, but rather crappy in comparison to…
I was surprised to learn, given the inelegance of much of Matlab, that it was explicitly influenced by APL. See the blue callout box at
http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clev...
which shows part of a 1983 plan for Matlab:
"Combining the technology of 1) mice and windows, 2) matrix and APL environments, and 3) direct manipulation, will do for engineers what Lotus 1-2-3 has done for the business world."
Ulf Grenander, the Brown University mathematician who invented statistical pattern theory, once used APL, but moved to Matlab for his expository book on pattern theory:
http://books.google.com/books?id=lxBDcFvFFvsC&pg=PA146&#...
I agree that the vectorized operations in Matlab are good at lifting computational ideas out of the fog of nested for loops. It is more compact to represent some matrix algebra in Matlab notation than in ordinary matrix notation, as anyone who has read Golub and van Loan knows.
It's weird to proclaim, but this concise notation can be as freeing for certain problems as Prolog's declarative transformations, and functional composition in Lisp.
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#13Read the award winning Babel-17 by Delany for a bit of science fiction that explores this idea that language and particularly the notation of the language affects one's perception of the world.
For another sci-fi novel dealing with language, I'd recommend China Mieville's Embassytown.
Also, the Nebula-winning "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.
Available on Archive.org:http://web.archive.org/web/20081015201424/http://heptapod.or...
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#14From the article:
- Ease of expressing constructs arising in problems.
- Suggestivity.
- Ability to subordinate detail.
- Economy
- Amenability to formal proofs.
I think it would be very useful to improve notation for programming languages as well (we could borrow a lot from mathematics).
With all the advances in display technology and unicode everywhere, you'd say there is no longer a need to limit ourselves to flat 7-bit ASCII in a simple grid. Still, we do. Is it really the best way, as it seems lacking on all the above points, or simply a matter of habit?
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
For another sci-fi novel dealing with language, I'd recommend China Mieville's Embassytown.
Also, the Nebula-winning "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. Available on Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20081015201424/http://heptapod.or...
[deleted]
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#16I like the idea that notation is a tool of thought, but I think that J (and APL) are actually rather crappy notations. I FAR prefer matlab for matrix work, as it is closer to actual math than any other language I know. For logic ish programming, Prolog or AMPL or SQL (I like SQL, even though people hate on it all the time). But, in my humble, J and APL are interesting historically, but rather crappy in comparison to…
I was surprised to learn, given the inelegance of much of Matlab, that it was explicitly influenced by APL. See the blue callout box at http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clev... which shows part of a 1983 plan for Matlab: "Combining the technology of 1) mice and windows, 2) matrix and APL environments, and 3) direct manipulation, will do for engineers what Lotus 1-2-3 has done for the business w…
I think "the inelegance of Matlab" is MUCH overstated. It has some weirdnesses, some of which are fixed in Octave (it's gnu cousin). But some apparent bad choices (anything to do with cell arrays, especially) are really quite powerful when you get to know them.
(If you ask me, R/SPLUS is the inelegant language, especially when doing serious matrix -- yuck! But it's trendy....)
Matlab is a lot like SQL -- people love to hate on it because it isn't perfect and they know it really well (because it is ubiquitous and pragmatic).
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#17I like the idea that notation is a tool of thought, but I think that J (and APL) are actually rather crappy notations. I FAR prefer matlab for matrix work, as it is closer to actual math than any other language I know. For logic ish programming, Prolog or AMPL or SQL (I like SQL, even though people hate on it all the time). But, in my humble, J and APL are interesting historically, but rather crappy in comparison to…
Have you ever used J or APL seriously? If yes, what do you find so "crappy" about the notations? If no, please keep your uninformed opinion to yourself, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#18Original PDF here: http://elliscave.com/APL_J/tool.pdf
Thank you! I think here might be the appropriate place to comment on the irony of a web page espousing good notation having its own notation mangled by a bad PDF->HTML translation.
At the bottom of the page, there are the following instructions: The text requires the APL385 Unicode font, which can be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/baavector/fonts .
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was surprised to learn, given the inelegance of much of Matlab, that it was explicitly influenced by APL. See the blue callout box at http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clev... which shows part of a 1983 plan for Matlab: "Combining the technology of 1) mice and windows, 2) matrix and APL environments, and 3) direct manipulation, will do for engineers what Lotus 1-2-3 has done for the business w…
I think "the inelegance of Matlab" is MUCH overstated. It has some weirdnesses, some of which are fixed in Octave (it's gnu cousin). But some apparent bad choices (anything to do with cell arrays, especially) are really quite powerful when you get to know them. (If you ask me, R/SPLUS is the inelegant language, especially when doing serious matrix -- yuck! But it's trendy....) Matlab is a lot like SQL -- people love…
It has improved a lot. In the late 1990s it was decidedly behind the scripting languages of the time, and that's partly what I was referring to.
And, the weird lack-of-speed issues. It used to be that you could implement a matrix multiply, in an m-file, that would be faster than the builtin *. I benchmarked this myself.
Re: Notation as a Tool of Thought
#20Original PDF here: http://elliscave.com/APL_J/tool.pdf
God bless you.