Re: [stack] Re: Joy noob checking in!

stevan apter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Duke Normandin wrote:
>> So you're saying that Joy was indeed flawed right from the onset?
> there are several reasons to start with Joy.  first, because it
> is incredibly simple.  second, because it is accompanied by several
> beautiful papers by manfred on the theory of computing.  in my
> opinion, the ideas in those papers (and the one on concatenative
> combinators by brent kirby) are more valuable than any of the
> implementations.  i'm fairly confident billy will agree.

All good points, stevan.

I do think that Manfred's papers are very much worth reading, and in
order to read them you'll need to learn at least scraps of Joy. That's
as far as I got, personally; I didn't have to learn the whole
language, and it may be that it's partially because I'm already
proficient in a stack language so it all seemed natural to me.

> and since i'm an array-head, i will recommend having a look at k.

And by "k" you perhaps mean "q", since k isn't generally available
anymore... And Q has an excellent online book, "Q for Mortals". Linked
to as part of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_Kx_Systems)

I do like Q. It's proprietary, but it's so good it's got a lot of HUGE
customers using it, so it's unlikely to die.

-Wm