> Thirty years ago J may have been the best language for working with tensors, > but other languages have caught up
Not sure that is true, at least for me. I find J tensor operations much nicer to deal with than, say, Numpy. I still find the Python / Numpy syntax still gets in the way of writing a solution, and is rather cumbersome, whereas J seems to "flow" a lot more easily. Anyway, I don't think J has any "killer advantage". It is just a nice, well designed language that is very fun to work with. It will never be a mainstream language, but I don't think it needs to be. -------------------------------------------- On Thu, 1/4/18, Dabrowski, Andrew John <[email protected]> wrote: Subject: [Jchat] J's killer advantage? To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Thursday, January 4, 2018, 5:30 AM Would it be fair to say that J's killer advantage over other programming languages is brevity? That you can quickly code a lot of operations, and display a meaningful lot of code on one screen. At first I thought APL stood for array processing language, since APL/J are so tensor-centric. Thirty years ago J may have been the best language for working with tensors, but other languages have caught up; I don't think J any longer has an advantage in that domain. And given that working with dicts and trees brings one in close contact with J's worst feature, i.e. Boxes, I don't think J can now be considered a strong language for data manipulation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
