what are some of J's unique features?

Question

Hi, I come from a background of C, Fortran, Python, R, Matlab, and some Lisp - and I've read a few things on Haskell. What are some neat ideas/examples in J or other languages from the APL family that are unique and not implemented in more common languages? I'm always interested in finding out what I'm missing...

Answer 1

I think one of the most interesting aspects of J is that it is one of the very few non-von-Neumann languages that is even remotely mainstream.

Uhm. J mainstream? Well, yeah, compared to other non-von-Neumann languages it is! There are only very few non-von-Neumann languages to begin with, most of those only live inside some PhD thesis and were never actually implemented and those that were implemented usually have a userbase of 1 if even that. Generally, they are considered successful if at least one of the users doesn't sit on the same floor as the guy who invented it.

Compared to that, J is mainstream. In particular, J is based on John Backus's FP from his seminal Turing Award Lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" and it is AFAIK the only working implementation of it. (I don't think Backus ever actually implemented FP, for example.)

Answer 2

J has a very large set of operators that make it easy to gin up complex programs without having to hunt for a library. It has extremely powerful array processing capabilities, as well as iterative constructs that make explicit control structures irrelevant for most purposes -- so much so that I prefer using tensor algebra to declaring an explicit loop because it's more convenient. J runs in an interpreter, but a good J script can be just as fast as a program written in a compiler language. (When you take out explicit loops, the interpreter doesn't have to compile the contents of the loop every time it executes.)

Another fun feature of J is tacit programming. You can build scripts without explicit reference to input variables, which lets you express an idea purely in terms of what you intend to do. For example, I could define the average function as 'summing the terms in a list and dividing them by the number of entries in the list' like so:

(+/ % #)

or I could make a script that slices into a 2D array and only returns the averages of rows that have averages greater than 10:

(10&<#])(+/%#)"1

There's lots of other neat stuff you can do with J; it's an executable form of mathematical notation. Ideas generalize easily, so you get a lot of benefit out of learning any one aspect of how the language works.

Answer 3

This is perhaps not as unique as I make it out to be, but the top feature I can think of for J is implicit typing. It creates that nice abstraction level above execution and memory management to focus on the data being processed.

Suppose you need to store a number:

var1 =: 10

And it's done. Array?

var2 =: 4 8 15 16 23 42

Done. Oh, but wait, you need to divide that by 3.7? Don't bother with casting, just go for it:

var2 % 3.7

Being rid of that necessity to cast and manipulate and allocate is a tiny blessing.