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Readability is subjective and largely colored by your experience. Verbosity or succinctness isn't the problem here; it's that the syntax and semantics of Q are unfamiliar to you. I think it's very important to take a moment to step back and consider how many choices in language design you may be casually taking for granted. Many mainstream languages today- Java, Python, Ruby, C, PHP etc.- have very similar core semantics and syntax. Choices of keywords and type systems differ, but loads of ideas work the same, especially when you consider idiomatic everyday code- for loops, scalar variables, some superset of the algebraic rules for operator precedence you learn in math class. Whitespace in an expression tends to be irrelevant, but sometimes its absence is significant. To add a scalar to a list, you use a loop. Assignment operators flow right to left. Lists tend to be indexed from zero. How many of these choices are essential and how many are arbitrary? All of these languages are descendants of FORTRAN and ALGOL, sometimes with some ideas from the Lisp family thrown in. They share a common heritage. Q, K, J, A+ and APL represent an entirely parallel course of evolution. Within this family there is a great deal of mutual intelligibility. I'm very familiar with K, but the Q dialect doesn't surprise me. When learned, it's familar- readable. What did source code look like to you before you learned to program? The APL family isn't amazing because programs tend to be short; that's a side-effect of the positive properties of these languages. They teach you to write naturally parallel solutions to problems and offer a simple, consistent way to compound together and apply functions to large structures at once. Please don't say "this looks different than I'm used to" and then close your mind to what the paradigm has to offer. |
It's decent for prototyping though, although I bet most people would prototype just as fast or faster in Python.