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Hey Scott...didn't know u were on HN. I've enjoyed most of your writing tremendously and am sad Kerf didn't work for you and your business partner. I hope you f

Hey Scott...didn't know u were on HN. I've enjoyed most of your writing tremendously and am sad Kerf didn't work for you and your business partner. I hope you find time to write more about J in the future. Your comment on not wanting to write another single For-Loop has really resonated with me. I've played with J/APL/CommonLisp/Clojure and nearly another dozen languages, but Python has traditionally been my daily driver. Recently though I've been using Mathematica and have been very impressed with the terseness. There are zillions of functions that are very easy to combine to get things done. It is kind of like a Lisp on the backend as most functions consume and create lists. I've found having primitives for charting, graph-theory, numerical solvers, and OS level stuff to be very enjoyable with no explicit looping. They also have plenty of primitives for things like FFT and Linear Algebra...the price is quite high though.

scottlocklin 9y ago
I guess I use R for the sorts of things I might use Mathematica for. Mathematica is kind of the opposite of J; with J you only have a few primitives. Mathematica is a swiss army knife for data and math. Python is fine; I was an early adopter, I just don't have any reason to prefer it to R (package quality perhaps). Kerf was a tough slog, but Kevin and I landed on our feet. We'll do something with the code one of these days.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Agreed on that front. I've used R & Mathematica as a swiss-army-knife for those things as well, although the stats stuff I do is a lot more basic than the stuff you do professionally. I'd like to get more proficient at J & APL, but that is a long road I've found. Glad to hear y'all found something after Kerf. I would've guessed there would be some market for a tsdb cheaper than kdb+ (what I assume y'all were trying to do). Your blog post mentioning overhyped tech really gave me a chuckle. In college I started to focus on nanotechnology before going to a career fair and talking to some companies. Thousands of students getting degrees focused on that and there are only a handful of startups hiring researchers and only so many grad-student type jobs. I had a physics professor tell me a niche field comes up like that every decade which gets a lot of funding, but essentially under delivers and dies out. I think there is some benefit to nano materials like high strength cables, but not the miracle sauce that is getting preached everywhere.
  - scottlocklin 9y ago
    Material science is real; nanotech, not so much. Glad you found your way out of that dead end. I have a friend with a Ph.D. in nanotech. He is a pretty good GPU programmer.

scottlocklin 9y ago

I guess I use R for the sorts of things I might use Mathematica for. Mathematica is kind of the opposite of J; with J you only have a few primitives. Mathematica is a swiss army knife for data and math. Python is fine; I was an early adopter, I just don't have any reason to prefer it to R (package quality perhaps). Kerf was a tough slog, but Kevin and I landed on our feet. We'll do something with the code one of these days.

throwaway7645 9y ago
Agreed on that front. I've used R & Mathematica as a swiss-army-knife for those things as well, although the stats stuff I do is a lot more basic than the stuff you do professionally. I'd like to get more proficient at J & APL, but that is a long road I've found. Glad to hear y'all found something after Kerf. I would've guessed there would be some market for a tsdb cheaper than kdb+ (what I assume y'all were trying to do). Your blog post mentioning overhyped tech really gave me a chuckle. In college I started to focus on nanotechnology before going to a career fair and talking to some companies. Thousands of students getting degrees focused on that and there are only a handful of startups hiring researchers and only so many grad-student type jobs. I had a physics professor tell me a niche field comes up like that every decade which gets a lot of funding, but essentially under delivers and dies out. I think there is some benefit to nano materials like high strength cables, but not the miracle sauce that is getting preached everywhere.
- scottlocklin 9y ago
  Material science is real; nanotech, not so much. Glad you found your way out of that dead end. I have a friend with a Ph.D. in nanotech. He is a pretty good GPU programmer.