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        The coding style of the J Incunabulum is shocking. The story I read is that Arthur Whitney does not like scrolling. A program should fit on a page. Thus he developed a novel style of writing C code. I enjoyed figuring out how the code works, and that was the key to being able to read the code in the J implementation.

        Whitney’s terseness doesn’t stop with his C coding style. He later developed the K language, which is simpler and terser than J. The K executable (I have the 2021 Shakti 2.0 version) is 155K on Linux, that includes the K language with a REPL, a high performance database (for which K is the query language), an HTTPS client, and probably other goodies.