I love being able to see an example and type it my editor in without having to switch back and forth a bunch of times because I forgot some syntax by the time I switched windows. Your data is a ball of dough and you can knead it into whatever shape you want with the primitives.

Even if I don't know what the symbols are, its still easier to remember because its less stuff you have to type in. Its a little bit of work up front to learn some of the verbs (why not use Anki and some mnemonics), but you really do have so much more room to think about the problem in your head. The compression is like a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

Less to type in when writing code and less to look at when reading code

"Why "J"? It is easy to type."

Terse languages are the best

I usually show it to folks when it comes to code aesthetics. They end up in disbelief.

When when you have a problem that perfectly fits the bill, they are very good at it.

The problem is they are terrible at everything else. I/O, data validation, manipulation strings, parsing, complex logic trees...

So I feel like just like regexes, there should be an array language parser embedded in most languages, that you opt in locally for just this little nudge.

In Python, it would be nice to be able to "import j" like you "import re" in the sdlib.

The entire J code base, including utility scripts, a console, a stdlib and a regex engine, is 3mb.

That is an alarming statement, especially as the first line on the site.

> Words are expressed in the standard ASCII alphabet. Primitive words are spelled with one or two letters; two letter words end with a period or a colon. The entire spelling scheme is shown in the system summary. The verb ;: facilitates exploration of the rhematic rules. Thus:

       ;: 'sum =:+/_6.95*i.3 4'
    ┌───┬──┬─┬─┬─────┬─┬──┬───┐
    │sum│=:│+│/│_6.95│*│i.│3 4│
    └───┴──┴─┴─┴─────┴─┴──┴───┘
    

I'm already lost, and this is the first example.