APL is also semantically compact, because every verb implicitly maps over a whole collection.* This interests me more than the whole "programming with wingings" bit, but that's the part people get hung up on. Like all those damn parentheses in Lisp, or the whitespace in Python. (Shrug.) I'm more interested in J, which limits itself to ASCII.
* Joy also does this, but seems much less practical.
Chinese is also not a great comparison, because the vocabulary is so large. I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, but changed it to Chinese because the "page with a grid of Chinese characters" is probably how most people think APL looks.
* Joy also does this, but seems much less practical.
Chinese is also not a great comparison, because the vocabulary is so large. I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, but changed it to Chinese because the "page with a grid of Chinese characters" is probably how most people think APL looks.