Although some academics (like myself) are intrigued by them, APL-like languages (APL, J, K, Q, etc.) have very little to do with academia historically, and were developed pretty much isolated from the academic programming languages community. APL itself does have distant roots in academia, growing out of notation Iverson developed at Harvard in the 1950s, but its history as a programming language goes via IBM and a variety of other companies generally focused on enterprise and finance (I.P. Sharp, Morgan Stanley, Dyalog, Kx Systems).
As for J, it was released by a startup, J Software, founded by Kenneth Iverson and Roger Hui in 1990 for that purpose. It was later open sourced in 2011.
Re:Manipulate Functions with the J Language
by throwaway7645 on Saturday July 29, 2017 @03:43PM
(#14882724)
It was probably fine in the 90's when I'm guessing it was written. I personally think the minimalistic design is great, which is a trait of both the language and community. The problem is different parts of the site have different and inconsistent menus, so navigation can be cumbersome at times.
I don't know if it's academia or what - but if I spent the effort on creating a whole programming language that I believed was actually good - I'd have a very different front page.