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Add to SafariWhen comparing J vs PicoLisp, the Slant community recommends J for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” J is ranked 34th while PicoLisp is ranked 66th. 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 Integrated database and Prolog engine
Pro Fast code execution speed
One of the fastest code execution speeds compared to other Lisp dialects.
Pro Simplicity
Compared to other Lisp dialects, it's simple and doesn't have unnecessary features.
Pro Tacit
Code written in is short and easier to understand most of the time.
Pro Foreign function interface
The language has built-in FFI for C and also interfaces with java(via ersatz)
Cons
Con Syntax is pure madness
quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)
Con Lack of Floating point data type
The language does not have floating point numbers only scaled fix-point numbers. Scaling of numbers is more work than directly working with floats.
