“[..] to present to the eye some picture by which the course of their reasonings might be traced: it was however necessary to fill up this outline by a tedious description, which in some instances even of no peculiar difficulty became nearly unintelligible, simply from its extreme length”
- Babbage on Java, 1821.
My stumblings in APL involve a continuous adjustment of functions and data to fit each other, an impedance matching, a continuous going up and down lochs, now to enclose this, now to align this vector with that nested vector, now to mix that nested vector into a matrix to feed into a function with a first axis rank adjustment.. and it feels like a system built of ill-fitting parts because of it.
Perhaps it’s not APL inherently being an elegant notation, but smart people’s ability to express their thoughts elegantly in whatever notation they are using?
My stumblings in APL involve a continuous adjustment of functions and data to fit each other, an impedance matching, a continuous going up and down lochs, now to enclose this, now to align this vector with that nested vector, now to mix that nested vector into a matrix to feed into a function with a first axis rank adjustment.. and it feels like a system built of ill-fitting parts because of it.
Perhaps it’s not APL inherently being an elegant notation, but smart people’s ability to express their thoughts elegantly in whatever notation they are using?