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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

J feels a lot like Smalltalk and Lisp to me. If you got on board early, you could do all sorts of stuff other languages struggled to make easy and performant. Hence the set of dedicated users. And there are some genuinely interesting conceptual things going on in array languages which have real appeal. But in the end I think J reflects a previous era and hasn't caught up to really useful ideas in more contemporary languages, probably because its user base is too conservative.

I wouldn't recommend people use XLisp or run Genera in a VM to solve real problems. Recommending J feels like that to me.

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I see your point. You dream crushing bastard. :)

For no reason whatsoever here is a link to a guy building a Korean style wooden house by hand without using nails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvsvMzgiq6s

What are "real problems" anyway?

Sigh. You're right, I know you're right. Somehow this field is losing appeal over time. I'm going for a walk.

> Somehow this field is losing appeal over time.

Not true, at all! Since 2010 or so, the APL family has only improved its reputation and grown in popularity. I listed some developments of the past two years at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930064. Now, it's not much relative to the huge growth of array frameworks like TensorFlow with more mainstream language design, but it is definitely not losing appeal.

Oh no, Marshall, I was being far more despondent and was referring to programming as a whole. Thank you very much for your efforts on BQN.

Speaking of TensorFlow, I was looking at tinygrad the other day: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/tens...

Very tempted to port it to BQN. I could be wrong but I bet it would shine for that. You could print the whole thing on a t-shirt.

Oh, thanks for clarifying, since it occurred to me that you might mean just the appeal to you, but not that you meant the field of programming! I'm no NN expert, but tinygrad looks very approachable in BQN. You might be interested in some other initial work along those lines: https://github.com/loovjo/BQN-autograd with automatic differentiation, and the smaller https://github.com/bddean/BQNprop using backprop.

TBF, that guy isn't doing it for the fun of it (OK, partly for the fun of it) but because Mr. Chickadee is a content creator. Sure, it's a lifestyle choice, but he also makes his living do it. I love his channel, but his lifestyle is as much a product of our modern world as the Java programming language is.

> I wouldn't recommend people use XLisp or run Genera in a VM to solve real problems. Recommending J feels like that to me.

Genera and interlisp are great. I wouldn't deploy them because:

1) slow

2) no multithreading

3) incompatible with modern cls

Point 3 is being worked on (for genera at least, and possibly also for interlisp). But none of these seems significant wrt j.

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