Ray Tracing in J

Ray Tracing in J 2020-04-18 I've been reading up on J and decided another small project was in order, this time I've written a minimal ray tracer. Brevity J is, perhaps infamously, a terse language. I think it may sometimes get unfairly discounted for this brevity because of the flavor of the syntax (namely, ASCII). It can be a little hard to describe, but the syntax isn't the hard part of learning J, the jarring parts are a result of the paradigm differences in array programming. By the time I've started to wrap my head around the very functional, array oriented style of programming the syntax has started to fall away. At least in the case of my own code I don't find the syntax being an obstacle, I'm curious how this would hold up in the face of someone else's code. Tacit Verbs One piece of syntax that bears explaining is J's means of tacit programming (that is, functions which make no reference to their arguments). While there is a bit more depth to it than I bother using, I've ... Read full article.