Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wyc 4062 days ago
The notation section reminded me of what good tools APL/J/K/Q were for dealing with matrices:

http://jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm

Instead of Mat.Inverse(), there's an operator that actually means "take the inverse of this matrix". Likewise, the power operator in J, if given infinity as the exponent, will apply a function to a value until the fixed-point is reached. Haskell's infix operators also steer towards this direction of expressiveness.

It's pretty liberating to be able to use programming symbols to represent computations in the same way the integral symbol represents integration. However, the barrier to literacy is inevitably raised.