Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariJ vs TouchDevelop
When comparing J vs TouchDevelop, the Slant community recommends J for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” J is ranked 47th while TouchDevelop is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose J is:
3 classes of operators (verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions) with verbs the most basic function that take either 1 or 2 (infix) parameters. Operators allow function composition with a minimum of parentheses.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Every function is an operator
3 classes of operators (verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions) with verbs the most basic function that take either 1 or 2 (infix) parameters. Operators allow function composition with a minimum of parentheses.
Pro Simpler Imperative language constructs as failback to functional programming
J also supports multiline functional definitions similar to BASIC/Pascal. Including error handling.
Pro Compiled language speed from interpreted language.
Each built in operator is a C/asm function, and special code further optimizes some operator combinations. Result is optimized C speed from quick parsing. Array orientation parses and compiles a function once, and applies it to all array items.
Pro 25 year old language, with core unchanged in last 10 years
Still actively developed, but most recent changes have been in libraries and IDE and platform support.
Language is considered "perfected"... though not quite.
Pro Language reference has simple one page index
Complete core programming functional tools allow writting programs and libraries without imports.
Pro No operator precedence rules
(... within each of the 3 operator classes) makes reading code easier. Very simple parsing rules.
Pro Advanced editor
- Browser based that is semi-structured as well as touchscreen friendly with a configurable presentation.
Pro Powerful APIs
APIs exist for persistent and shared data as well as for game engines and accelerometer, geolocation etc.
Cons
Con Syntax is pure madness
quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)
Con No collection literals
Collections can be initialized only verbosely.
Con No union types
There are no ADTs, not even enums.
Con No advanced expressions
There is no conditional expression or pattern matching.
