JQuery, Project Euler and J

My Journey took me down a different path than I thought. I started working on system administration, customization of web applications and development of web applications. Besides liking web.py for lightweight user interfaces to Python programs, I went back into the world of PHP, HTML and JavaScript, where my programming life started.

It began with a pleasant surprise: JQuery.
JQuery makes manipulating the DOM easy and I actually enjoy web development now. I understand CSS layouts a lot better, too and given the choice, I would rather write a web UI than a traditional UI using for instance wxWidgets.

Now that I actually understand closures and object systems, I find JavaScript to be a very elegant language. A very elegant language with many badly hidden warts, that is.


In my quest to learn enough of Python to use it for quick scripts, I also worked on Project Euler from time to time. The problems are mostly very interesting and creating a solution is a nice challenge. I was also confronted with the limits of Python (speed), up to the point where I used SBCL or C and GNU MP lib to get results in an acceptable time.

I will tackle more problems as time permits, but it seems like I already caught most of the low-hanging fruit.


Continuing my tradition of looking at programming languages outside the mainstream, I started playing with J, a descendant of the APL.

It's hard to believe I would one day understand something like

(+/%#)1 2 3 4 5

and consider it elegant, but J did this to me.

I find it very awkward to use for everyday tasks, but for numerical computing it's one of the most beautiful languages I've ever seen. Learning the basics was a lot easier than I thought, the excellent primer offers a nice introduction to the language.

Although I haven't experimented much yet, I'm amazed by the visualization possibilities of J. And most of all: It's fun. That's most important of all things.