Last Updated on May 22, 2022
The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is an array programming language based primarily on APL (also by Iverson). It’s available on a wide variety of computers and operating systems. J is distinguished by its simple and consistent rules, a large set of built-in capabilities, powerful facilities for defining new operations, and a general and systematic treatment of arrays.
The J system provides: an engine for executing J; various front ends that provide user interfaces to the J engine; a library, written in J, that provides an IDE (interactive development environment), numerous tools, utilities, demos, tutorials; and online documentation.
J is a very terse array programming language, and is most suited to mathematical and statistical programming, especially when performing operations on matrices. It has also been used in extreme programming and network performance analysis.
J supports function-level programming via its tacit programming features.
J is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 3.
1. Easy-J by Linda Alvord and Norman Thomson
J is both a language and an exceptional programming package which provides a
highly concise notation for specifying much that is done routinely in the day to day
business of computing, such as sorting, searching, updating and restructuring data.
2. J Reference Card
This is an invaluable reference card.
3. A Brief J Reference by Chris Burke and Cliff Reiter
This brief reference gives informal descriptions of most of the J primitives.
Not every primitive is included and some idioms, examples and other resources have been added where appropriate.
Since the presentation is brief and informal, it is not a replacement for the main J references: the J Introduction and Dictionary, the J User manual and the J Primer.
If you want to learn more about J, check out our recommended free J books.
All tutorials in this series:
| Free Programming Tutorials | |
|---|---|
| ABAP | Advanced Business Application Programming |
| Ada | ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and others |
| Agda | Dependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic type theory |
| Alice | Educational language with an integrated development environment |
| Arduino | Inexpensive, flexible, open source microcontroller platform |
| Assembly | As close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal |
| Awk | Versatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing |
| Bash | ‘Bourne-Again-SHell’ is both a shell and programming language |
| BASIC | Family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages |
| C | General-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language |
| C++ | General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language |
| C# | Combines the power and flexibility of C++ with the simplicity of Visual Basic |
| Chapel | Parallel-programming language in development at Cray Inc. |
| Clojure | Dialect of the Lisp programming language |
| ClojureScript | Compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript |
| COBOL | Common Business-Oriented Language |
| CoffeeScript | A very succinct programming language that transcompiles into JavaScript |
| Coq | Dependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F*, Lean, and others |
| Crystal | General-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented language |
| CSS | CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance |
| D | General-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax |
| Dart | Client-optimized programming language for fast apps |
| Dylan | Multi-paradigm language, supports functional & object-oriented programming |
| ECMAScript | Best known as the language embedded in web browsers |
| Eiffel | Object-oriented language |
| Elixir | Relatively new functional language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine |
| Elm | Functional language that compiles to JavaScript |
| Emacs Lisp | A dialect of the Lisp programming language. |
| Erlang | General-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language |
| F# | General purpose, strongly typed, multi-paradigm language. Part of ML |
| Factor | Dynamic stack-based language |
| Forth | Imperative stack-based programming language |
| Fortran | The first high-level language, using the first compiler |
| GDScript | Godot’s built-in language for scripting and interacting with nodes |
| Go | Compiled, statically typed programming language |
| Groovy | Powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language |
| Hack | For the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), created as a dialect of PHP |
| Haml | HTML Abstraction Markup Language |
| Haskell | Standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language |
| Icon | High-level, general-purpose language |
| Imba | Full-stack language that compiles to performant JavaScript |
| J | Array programming language based primarily on APL |
| Java | General-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language |
| JavaScript | Interpreted, prototype-based, scripting language |
| Julia | High-level, high-performance language for technical computing |
| Kotlin | Statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference |
| LabVIEW | Designed to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly |
| LaTeX | Professional document preparation system and document markup language |
| Less | Backwards-compatible language extension for Cascading Style Sheets |
| Limbo | Designed for applications running distributed systems on small computers |
| Lisp | Unique features - excellent to study programming constructs |
| Logo | Dialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility |
| Lua | Designed as an embeddable scripting language |
| Markdown | Plain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write |
| MoonScript | Dynamic scripting programmer friendly language that compiles into Lua |
| Nim | Statically typed compiled systems language with syntax resembling Python |
| Objective-C | General purpose language which is a superset of C |
| OCaml | General-purpose, powerful, high-level language |
| Octave | High-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations |
| OpenCL | Open Computing Language |
| Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
| Perl | High-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language |
| Pike | Interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic language |
| PHP | PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years |
| Pony | Pony is an actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance language |
| PostScript | Page description language in electronic and desktop publishing |
| Prolog | General purpose, declarative, logic programming language |
| PureScript | Small strongly, statically typed language with expressive types |
| Python | General-purpose, structured, powerful language |
| QML | Hierarchical declarative language for user interface layout with a syntax to JSON |
| R | De facto standard among statisticians and data analysts |
| Racket | Platform for programming language design and implementation |
| Raku | Member of the Perl family of programming languages |
| Roff | Extensible text formatting language and a set of programs for printing |
| Ruby | General purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language |
| Rust | Ideal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code |
| Scala | Modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language |
| Scheme | General-purpose, functional, language descended from Lisp and Algol |
| Scratch | Visual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children |
| Solidity | Object-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts |
| SQL | Access and manipulate data held in a relational database management system |
| Standard ML | One of the two main dialects of the ML language |
| Swift | Powerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language |
| Tcl | Dynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells |
| TypeScript | Strict syntactical superset of JavaScript, adding optional static typing |
| V | Statically typed compiled language to build maintainable software |
| Vala | Object-oriented language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code |
| VHDL | Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language |
| VimL | Powerful scripting language of the Vim editor |
| XML | Set of rules for defining semantic tags that describe the structure and meaning |
| Zig | General-purpose programming language and toolchain |