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by calinet6 4257 days ago
It does not matter. This is not a programming language; languages are designed for human comprehension. Human comprehension is an irreducible part of the whole paradigm of programming, being necessary to understand the nearly always complex logic required to describe anything of value.

This is gibberish. It fails at the one task of a programming language: to translate something a human can understand into something a computer can understand, with as little confusion as possible.

3 comments

No, it is just not a language for the masses who have gotten used to all programming language syntax being minor variations on the Algol/Pascal/C theme.

Much like math and physics, this is an extremely terse notation that is immensely useful to those who practice it, and looks like gibberish to those who have not attempted to study it. You could give the same comment about an article in any area of math whose notation you are unfamiliar with -- and you would be just as equally wrong.

Any language you don't know is gibberish—hence the proverb, "it's all Greek to me." Please don't dismiss the unfamiliar just because it's strange.
You owe to yourself to read the Iverson's Turing lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought". You can find it. Apparently APL family can claim relationship to math notation - which is not a small claim. Lisp family does it too - in different way.