I do not use J daily but would like to. I know that many finance firms use KDB+ and Q to manage stock tick data - this is where I first saw KDB+ in action, odd

I do not use J daily but would like to. I know that many finance firms use KDB+ and Q to manage stock tick data - this is where I first saw KDB+ in action, oddly enough I was pulling some non-tick data from a KDB+ system for a data warehouse project. I think that J is one of those languages that would really shine in allowing a hacker with a large amount of domain specific knowledge to do wonderful work with small amounts of code. So, if you are a stats hacker interested in applied modeling, maybe you could use J to very concisely build your models. Probably bioinformatics would work as well, I can see how fastq data would be easier to deal with if you just chunked it into a KDB+ backend. There are lots of folks on HN who seem interested in J or KDB+ (see the Kona open source project) who might have better answers than this . . .