Arthur Whitney's short list comparison of J to Lisp/Scheme/Clojure

5 pointseggy3 comments

Arthur Whitney recently published a short list of the commonalities between Lisp/Scheme/Clojure and the J programming language on his site [1]. Concise, but a nice comparison. I've always favored J and Lisp, and thought they were leagues apart, but this brings some perspective to bear on this for me. Lambda (λ) calculus vs. Lambda-mu (λμ)? I need to read up on it more. Arthur Whitney created the K programming language, and founded Kx systems, heavily used in finance, which is known for its ability to query very large datasets with very low latency. He also wrote the initial prototype for J, along with the collaboration of Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, which was a continuation of APL, originally created by Iverson. The initial stab at J was very terse C code with lots of macros [2] that has been on HN before [3].

  [1] http://kx.com/q/lisp.txt
  [2] http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533843

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