J Home

[Owen Densmore]

I've been following math software for quite a while, mainly the free  
or open source packages.  Gnuplot naturally is one of the standards,  
surviving ages and always being handy.  Ditto for R, the statistics  
package .. bound to be around forever, I hope.  Octave, a matlab  
based system, has just released its latest, version 2.9.7.

Well, every now and again I go visit all these sites to see what's  
up.  A somewhat obscure site/package I follow is "J", an APL  
descendent which takes a symbolic-linguistic approach to math  
software.  It is very, very terse and has some interesting parsing  
stunts that promote very concise composition of functions.  A bit  
odd, just as APL was, but no longer requires special keyboards.  It  
remains matrix oriented although its syntax definitely gets close to  
math in terms of brevity.

Well, I see they've spiffed up their site, so I hope that means more  
activity.
   http://www.jsoftware.com/
Roger Hui, who wrote J with Ken, and Eric Iverson, Ken's son, are  
active on the site.  Ken passed away a few years ago.  JSoftware is a  
consultancy which uses J and thus helps pay to have it remain freely  
available.

Anyway, just wanted to pass on the news that the J community is  
becoming more active and well established.  I'd LOVE it if someone  
truly got their mind around J and could help the rest of us do the  
same!  Pretty steep learning curve.

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org

[Douglas Roberts-2]

Wow.  APL was my first language.  I guess that explains a lot, doesn't it...

Let's hear it for quad-domino!

--Doug

On 7/31/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:

>
> I've been following math software for quite a while, mainly the free
> or open source packages.  Gnuplot naturally is one of the standards,
> surviving ages and always being handy.  Ditto for R, the statistics
> package .. bound to be around forever, I hope.  Octave, a matlab
> based system, has just released its latest, version 2.9.7.
>
> Well, every now and again I go visit all these sites to see what's
> up.  A somewhat obscure site/package I follow is "J", an APL
> descendent which takes a symbolic-linguistic approach to math
> software.  It is very, very terse and has some interesting parsing
> stunts that promote very concise composition of functions.  A bit
> odd, just as APL was, but no longer requires special keyboards.  It
> remains matrix oriented although its syntax definitely gets close to
> math in terms of brevity.
>
> Well, I see they've spiffed up their site, so I hope that means more
> activity.
>    http://www.jsoftware.com/
> Roger Hui, who wrote J with Ken, and Eric Iverson, Ken's son, are
> active on the site.  Ken passed away a few years ago.  JSoftware is a
> consultancy which uses J and thus helps pay to have it remain freely
> available.
>
> Anyway, just wanted to pass on the news that the J community is
> becoming more active and well established.  I'd LOVE it if someone
> truly got their mind around J and could help the rest of us do the
> same!  Pretty steep learning curve.
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore
> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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[Steve Smith]

Owen, et alii  -

APL
I did my senior project for my undergrad CS minor in APL (30 years ago)
... a 3D scene-graph interpreter for Tek 4013's (with an APL
keyboard!)...   it was a blast... If the state of interpretive
languages in those days hadn't been so abysmal, it might have taken
off.   I still wax nostalgic when I see an old red APL manual in
someone's bookshelf (it dates them quite distinctly).  The APL syntax
w/o keyboard/special chars was not that bad... a little awkward but not
bad...  no worse than Excel Macros!

Interactive Data Analysis/Viz
I have a new need brewing... In all of my immersive Viz work, I find
the need for an interpreted math language to express at run-time a wide
variety of math, including complex, advanced statistics on-the-fly.    
I have considered R for the stats, but still don't like my choices for
basic math...   While at Berkeley, I was introduced to ROOT which not
only provides a wide range of data analysis functions but integrates a
C interpreter (seems like a fair way to specify basic functional math
on-the-fly... at least if you are a C programmer)...

I'll take a look at J.

[Marcus G. Daniels-2]

Owen Densmore wrote:
> I've been following math software for quite a while, mainly the free  
> or open source packages. [..]
> A somewhat obscure site/package I follow is "J", an APL  
> descendent which takes a symbolic-linguistic approach to math  
> software.
For scientific programming in the large, this DARPA funded project at
Sun may be of interest:

   
http://www.experimentalstuff.com/sunr/projects/plrg/PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf
> It is very, very terse and has some interesting parsing  
> stunts that promote very concise composition of functions.
Compare to page 33 of above (the use of Unicode to show math notation)

Marcus

[Owen Densmore]

Wow, thanks for the pointer!  This looks *very* promising.  Two other  
efforts pointed to by their home page:
   http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/
are IBM's X10 language:
   http://tinyurl.com/m9fma
and Cray's Chapel:
   http://chapel.cs.washington.edu/

Chapel's site, in turn, references the ZPL language as part of its  
inspiration:
   http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/zpl/

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net


On Aug 4, 2006, at 11:57 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

> Owen Densmore wrote:
>> I've been following math software for quite a while, mainly the free
>> or open source packages. [..]
>> A somewhat obscure site/package I follow is "J", an APL
>> descendent which takes a symbolic-linguistic approach to math
>> software.
> For scientific programming in the large, this DARPA funded project at
> Sun may be of interest:
>
>
> http://www.experimentalstuff.com/sunr/projects/plrg/ 
> PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf
>> It is very, very terse and has some interesting parsing
>> stunts that promote very concise composition of functions.
> Compare to page 33 of above (the use of Unicode to show math notation)
>
> Marcus
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org