FWIIW, the Jd database is pretty good (which works much like kdb+). It's not designed to work on distributed systems (kdb+ can do this), but it wouldn't be too

FWIIW, the Jd database is pretty good (which works much like kdb+). It's not designed to work on distributed systems (kdb+ can do this), but it wouldn't be too difficult to make it do this. I recently wrote a discrete wavelet transform algorithm in J. It took 4 lines. I could probably have done it in 1. Granted it took me a while to write these 4 lines, but it's pretty cool being able to take the whole thing in at a glance. While I was at it, I wrote my own query system for a much larger than memory dataset; that part only took a few minutes. One of the great things about J: it teaches you to appreciate the matrix subsystems of things like R. You can do a lot of J in R if you stay away from data.frames. Oh yeah, while the IDE is pretty nice, I use it in emacs. Some resources: Minimal J for beginners: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DevonMcCormick/MinimalBeginningJ http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DevonMcCormick/MinimalBeginni... A more wordy vocabulary for beginners: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc