well, i thought i would show the world how little i know by starting a blog.

i've always enjoyed learning -- and i like to learn new programming languages, but this time, i've bitten off more than i can chew.

i've embarked on a mission to learn APL (specifically, the dialect J). this learning project is daunting because i can't see a finishing line anywhere near the horizon. the practitioners of APL and it's dialects are the smartest cookies i've ever virtually met and the mailing lists for K and J can be intimidating in the level of understanding and depth of knowledge that the contributors display.

briefly, APL is a programming language with a mathematical notation and basis. it's a vector, or array programming language (however, APL stands for "A Programming Language", the title of a book by Kenneth E. Iverson in which he puts forward a mathematical notation for programming). Iverson won computing's nobel prize, the turing award, in 1979.

i could stay safe in my world of popular programming languages, but there is great wisom to be found in APL, so much so that i don't think i'll ever master it.

for the newcomer i describe J as regular expressions for vectors so you're not put off by:

qsort =: ]`(($:@:((}.<:{.)#}.)),{.,($:@:((}.>{.)#}.)))@.(*@#)

which is quicksort.