I am 61 years old. I have been working as a software engineer since the late 60's. I graduated from UCLA. I hope to retire from Northrup Grumman in the next few years.
I started my career writing APL at UCLA on a student work program and then upon graduation, started programming in Z80 and forth. Over the years, I moved into Unix and C/C++. From the late 60's to now, there has been a lot of water under the bridge and lots of Operating systems, languages and projects. Recently, I was a little bored writing regression testing in my companies proprietary language "babalonia" ( I am 1 or 4 people in the world that knows this language, but I doubt it will improve my marketability ). Anyhow, I mentioned to a fellow worker that I had done some APL and thought it was a great language. He said his father had been a APL programmer prior to his death in a car wreck. We talked about the character set problem and he said "look at J". My interests was tweaked. I installed J on my ubuntu linix box at home and on my Win2000 - running cygwin at work. Then started learning J in my spare time. Then I found reference to the "Euler Project" and started writing J code to solve the problems. Then Glen told me about opentick. He said he didn't use it, but it was interesting. Anyhow, I got the install package opentick code for Perl, C/C++ and java. This lead to the thread on J and Opentick. What is my motivation? I would say, the whole thing about J-Opentick is just a sequence of fortunate "it just happened". Also, I have some ideas about analyzing stock data that I wish to investigate and J will do just fine once I get over the initial learning curve. I will post a sample of my J code rendition for Historical Open-High-Low-Close Volatility: Yang Zhang which is defined at: http://www.sitmo.com/eq/417 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
