[silentbicycle]

J has it via APL, which is heavily based on linear algebra. (Not surprisingly, R, MATLAB, and other matrix-math-centric languages also have it.)

It's one thing to say, "yeah, I can kinda do this in [language]", it's quite another when your whole language is based on it, as the APL family are. If you can do array slicing in parallel, you can work with permutation vectors rather than sorts (as he notes), and guess what? The same idiom works for relational joins, among many other things. (The killer app for Q, kdb+, is an in-memory, column oriented relational database. NoSQL, before it was cool.)

[northbranch]

This pattern is incredibly useful in Q, and one of the things I miss about using it daily. Of course, now I mainly use java, so the pendulum has truly swung.