 Are there times when you wish you could just type in a few characters and have your computer do exactly what you want? J is a computer language that lets you do it. Want to multiply numbers? J makes your computer a calculator. Want to add a list of numbers? Just enter the list and J does the adding, or multiplying, or subtracting. No loops, no counters, just calculations. If you want to sum up a list the hard way, then you can just put pluses between each of the numbers. The easy way? Just put a forward slash after a plus in front of the list, and it will total the list. Change the plus to an asterisk, and you get the product. And you can quickly create arrays of any shape with up to 63 dimensions. Why would I want to work with arrays? Well, it might be as simple as displaying a times table, or as complicated as finding the inverse of a matrix. You see the R's in the middle of those numbers? That's how J lets you represent fractions precisely, numerator before the R, and denominator after. And that makes for some really easy arithmetic. But you say, I don't work with numbers, I work with words, and I want to be able to analyze a list of words? Well, give me some words, and with just two characters, I can box up each word, and then with 12 more characters, that's characters, not lines of code, I can return a table of the words and the number of times each word is in the list. This is because J is a language where you put parts together the way a plumber might connect pipes. But with J you have a lot of different pipes and connectors to work with, and then you can even build your own contraptions to fit onto J's existing pipes. And there are some very powerful pipes that have already been built for you. Say you have the last 99 days of Apple's closing price stored in the variable R, and you need to create a graph like right now. Using plot, it's super simple. Or maybe I want a bar graph. And let's put in a title. With plot, we can also use math to create beautiful graphs. If we want it, J already has a definition of the sign function. Remember those pipes? Then we can generate 10 intervals from minus 4 to plus 4, and take those values and apply sign to them. Now that we have the basics down, let's really go for a spin. Surface plots look pretty neat, and of course they're already built in. Now about a mathematical egg crate. The bottom line is J can do a lot of things without much fuss, and when it does them, it tends to do them very quickly. So if you're intrigued by J, check out some of these resources, and soon you'll be able to get your computer to do exactly what you want without having to do a lot of work yourself. Now get out there and play with J.