Talk:J (programming language)

Deletion justification
I deleted the content from the main page. The only content here was a C program designed to spawn a huge number of threads, presumably with the intent of crashing the computer it was run on. --Robert Merkel

"Hello Wikipedia!"
Is the "Hello World!" section correct? Does J really simply spit back any input it doesn't understand? --Maru 02:25, 15 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes: I have restored it. 'Hello world' is a literal string in J.  If this is the only entity on the line, it is evaluated and displayed. --JahJah 13:41, 20 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I've expanded on this issue on the page --RaulMiller 21:43, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Requested move
J programming language → J (programming language) – Conformance with WP naming conventions atanamir

remove index in "Dictionary" section
I propose the removal of the long verb index in the "Dictionary" section. It doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia. Explain the unique organization of the docs in dictionary form, sure, but no need to list all the nouns/verbs here. Better to link to the official index. The Cybercobra (talk) 06:43, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Open Source
I was looking at J and noted that the Wikipedia entry said that J source was not available. When I looked at their web site, source was actually available, under GPL3. They will also sell source. I suppose that this allows someone to avoid the need to keep a web site up and it allows them to distribute a modified interpreter w/o distributing the modified source, but why? In any case, I fixed the language and took out the, well, arguably snide speculation as to why they were delaying actually posting their source. I also added a reference to the source download page.

Simicich (talk) 02:33, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Examples
See the first paragraph. This seems confusing to me because the linked article describes code obfuscation as deliberate, yet the code is described as being "prone to" it, which implies that the problem is accidental. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.107.187.51 (talk) 00:18, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

FP and FL
The claim that J was influenced in any significant way by FP and FL appears to be false. It was added anonymously in 2003 with no source, probably because both J and FP can be considered "function-level" languages. The current source (link is dead, but it's now here) was written in 2007, and likely sourced from Wikipedia.

Roger Hui confirms in private communication that he knows of FP only from Backus's Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". It did not influence him personally and he has no reason to believe Iverson or Arthur Whitney, another key contributor to the language, made design decisions based on the paper or Backus's languages.

Roger points out that it's unlikely Backus's work had any major influence on APL. While APL's operators resemble the higher-order functions in FP, operators as higher-order functions were described at least as early as Iverson and Adin Falkoff's The Design of APL in 1973 (it's more likely that FP was influenced by APL). The concept of forks or function trains, which distantly resemble FP's functional manipulations, is mainly a syntactic innovation. Iverson and Eugene McDonnell's "Phrasal Forms" points out the similarity but also indicates that Backus's forms were used in APL as early as 1962, well before his Turing Award lecture in 1978, and that a feature which could imitate the mathematical sum of functions (f+g) was recognized as desirable by 1978. Trains themselves, that is, the recognition that the mathematical syntax could be built directly into APL, were invented by Iverson and McDonnell in 1988.

I am removing this claim from the page on J and those on FP and FL. --Marshall Lochbaum (talk) 19:11, 5 December 2019 (UTC)