I don't know whether this is before Roger Hui created J; but, he worked for a time at a financial firm that had developed it's own APL variant: A+. Arthur Whitney was also a primary author of A+ -- he later developed K for another financial firm. I'm a big A+ fan and it still lives (barely), despite management discomfort with reliance a proprietary non-standard language. A+ improves on APL is several ways: namespaces, better control structures (no "gotos"), symbol types (that are usable as: variables references, or keys in association lists, or enums, or to ease string manipulation), a good event model (dependencies for lazy evaluation, and callbacks for variable validation/ assignment/ formatting, etc.), a strong gui package, and reasonable performance. A+ in an Emacs IDE is the fastest development environment that I've personally experienced -- that said, it does require some care. A+ does a poor job of enforcing encapsulation and doesn't support inheritance. A+ applications tend to have a lot of global variables and frequently become memory hogs. Also, the APL font set limits portability and puts some people off. And finally, as a proprietary language it doesn't have all the glue to other packages that something like Python or Perl does.
I haven't worked with K; but, I understand that it improved execution performance, improved integration with external packages (DBs, spreadsheets, etc.), replaces the APL keyboard w/ ASCII, and added nested namespaces, at the expense of some of the A+ gui eye-candy.
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I don't know whether this is before Roger Hui created J; but, he worked for a time at a financial firm that had developed it's own APL variant: A+. Arthur Whitney was also a primary author of A+ -- he later developed K for another financial firm. I'm a big A+ fan and it still lives (barely), despite management discomfort with reliance a proprietary non-standard language. A+ improves on APL is several ways: namespaces, better control structures (no "gotos"), symbol types (that are usable as: variables references, or keys in association lists, or enums, or to ease string manipulation), a good event model (dependencies for lazy evaluation, and callbacks for variable validation/ assignment/ formatting, etc.), a strong gui package, and reasonable performance. A+ in an Emacs IDE is the fastest development environment that I've personally experienced -- that said, it does require some care. A+ does a poor job of enforcing encapsulation and doesn't support inheritance. A+ applications tend to have a lot of global variables and frequently become memory hogs. Also, the APL font set limits portability and puts some people off. And finally, as a proprietary language it doesn't have all the glue to other packages that something like Python or Perl does. I haven't worked with K; but, I understand that it improved execution performance, improved integration with external packages (DBs, spreadsheets, etc.), replaces the APL keyboard w/ ASCII, and added nested namespaces, at the expense of some of the A+ gui eye-candy.