I wanted to do some statistics, so I accidentally learned J (thinking it was R). J is like APL, but with digraphs (multiple characters) instead of special characters as symbols.
I don't think I ever actually did any stats with J, but I did play with it for a long time.
J is like an old school text adventure where you start with a blank screen that reads "You are in the woods" and, before you know it, it's Monday morning and you're considering calling out of work because you've almost decoded some elvish runes you found on a rock.
R is the single player campaign of a modern first person shooter, where you have infinite lives and your health regenerates if you sit and think for a while.
This isn't a perfect analogy. Maybe J is high school Spanish class, and R is Google translate? I remember enjoying J as a language and R as a tool. It's exciting to express new things in J. It's easy to do familiar things in R.
R also is really well documented - there was a time where experts were asking basic questions on Stack Overflow and answering them themselves, because that's where people look for documentation.
I've been trying to improve my J skills by doing the https://adventofcode.com/2022 puzzles. I got stuck on day 7 because recursion in J is possible but an advanced level incantation.
Day 1 was five short lines of code for Part One and another two lines for Part Two.
Each line of code needed four or five long lines of documentation.
On the J website the first sentence is:
'J is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that is particularly suited to the mathematical, statistical, and logical analysis of data.'
So I can see him thinking he has the correct language.
Did you ever switch to R? If so, how would you describe the two languages to a non-programmer?