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A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

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11–20 of 37 posts

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#11
post #7

Dear language creators Stop creating non-googlable language names R already is trouble enough, at least C is more known but still confusing

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&#... Not entirely sure I understand the problem here.

Not entirely sure I understand what happens here.

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#12
FTA:

> The C source code for this is intensely beautiful, and very concise. Go look at it!

Which links to https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

This has to be a joke - just pick a random file and tell me what is beautiful about that. LoseThos looks saner than this code.

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#13

Dear language creators Stop creating non-googlable language names R already is trouble enough, at least C is more known but still confusing

J the programming language is the first and third hit on Google. I never get this criticism anyway, just add some context ("programming", "language", "snippets", "libs" or whatever) and just about anything will be easy to find. Surely beats those ugly unique names that people come up with, give me Go over Clojure any day.

The problem is when you're referencing the language in other contexts or worse search engines

Example: searching for a package on aptitude or yum

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#14
I have never failed to have fun when I hacked anything at all in J (or in Q/KDB+).

But I have also never done any hacking in J except in the context of little bits of code for personal amusement.

Once interesting observation - despite not really knowing J well (or Clojure or Common Lisp, other languages I hack around in on a limited basis), I somehow spend more time thinking about what I want to accomplish rather than how to do it . . .

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#15

I found the codemonk series on J very entertaining as well: http://drj11.wordpress.com/category/j/ Does anyone on the board use J / K daily? What for?

I do not use J daily but would like to.

I know that many finance firms use KDB+ and Q to manage stock tick data - this is where I first saw KDB+ in action, oddly enough I was pulling some non-tick data from a KDB+ system for a data warehouse project.

I think that J is one of those languages that would really shine in allowing a hacker with a large amount of domain specific knowledge to do wonderful work with small amounts of code. So, if you are a stats hacker interested in applied modeling, maybe you could use J to very concisely build your models. Probably bioinformatics would work as well, I can see how fastq data would be easier to deal with if you just chunked it into a KDB+ backend.

There are lots of folks on HN who seem interested in J or KDB+ (see the Kona open source project) who might have better answers than this . . .

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#16
post #12

FTA: > The C source code for this is intensely beautiful, and very concise. Go look at it! Which links to https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona This has to be a joke - just pick a random file and tell me what is beautiful about that. LoseThos looks saner than this code.

It's concise, at least.

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#17
post #12

FTA: > The C source code for this is intensely beautiful, and very concise. Go look at it! Which links to https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona This has to be a joke - just pick a random file and tell me what is beautiful about that. LoseThos looks saner than this code.

They are just writing the C interpreter in a style that reassembles the target language as much as it is possible, I guess you would have to understand some K to better understand what they are up to in the C code.

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#18
post #12

FTA: > The C source code for this is intensely beautiful, and very concise. Go look at it! Which links to https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona This has to be a joke - just pick a random file and tell me what is beautiful about that. LoseThos looks saner than this code.

Kona is actually an implementation of k (not sure if he's planning to support q, which is k's successor), a cousin of J.

K was originally written by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scient..., and having seen some of his C code, this looks like a very similar style. Take a look here: http://www.nsl.com/papers/origins.htm

edit: included link to a better source example

Re: A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity

#19

Dear language creators Stop creating non-googlable language names R already is trouble enough, at least C is more known but still confusing

J the programming language is the first and third hit on Google. I never get this criticism anyway, just add some context ("programming", "language", "snippets", "libs" or whatever) and just about anything will be easy to find. Surely beats those ugly unique names that people come up with, give me Go over Clojure any day.

1 and 2 letter names cause trouble in other areas than pure Google search, mainly in search on specific web sites and forums.

For example searching for "Clojure" on Amazon is likely to find every book related to using Clojure. Searching for "Go" will come up with a lot of junk and searching for "Go programming" would not find any book with say "Go Development" or "Go Recipes". This leads to multiple searches with no guarantee you aren't missing a lot more.

How about trying to find a comparison of say Java and Go in a programming/technology forum, better hope that the forum supports 1 or 2 character searches and the threads have sensible labelling.

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