J programming language

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2013–2024), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with J programming language, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Very hard to read syntax standing in the way of ideas2024-01-04
Verb behaviour with mismatched shapes is unintuitive, so users must keep checking the docs2021-05-20
Hard to search for, since J's symbols don't work well in search2019-12-16
Hard to learn and read: ASCII line-noise syntax and tacit definitions2019-04-11
Finds simple arithmetic extremely confusing because equals works as an assertion2017-10-11
Hard to get IDE help or search code examples for sigil syntax2017-01-20
Unpaired brackets inside multi-symbol operators make J symbols hard to read and understand2015-04-01
Parsing complex J expressions is hard to work out unaided2014-05-24
Arbitrary nonsensical syntax must be relearned each time after forgetting2014-03-31
Some primitives need multiple characters, making the notation harder to read and write2013-07-29
Ranks and hook and fork constructs are hard to grok2013-02-22