The J programming language, developed in the early 90's by Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL (also by Iverson) and FP, the functional programming language created by John Backus (of Fortran, Algol, and BNF fame).

To avoid the problems faced by the special character set of APL, J requires only the basic ASCII character set, resorting to the use of dot and colon characters to extend the meaning of the basic characters available.

J is a very terse and powerful language, and is often found to be useful for math programming, especially when performing operations on matrices. It also offers a flexible namespace scheme ("locales") which can be used as a framework for OOP.

Since J has no explicit print statement, the Hello World program would be simply:

"Hello world"

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