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Comment by spacecowboy_lon | Hacker News Reader

lol you can tell who the old school Fortan programers are a sthey will use i and j

I thought everyone used i and j? No seriously, my first language was VB 6 (or 5?), so I'm not remotely old-school.

Well, if you go far enough in math, you'll learn the i, j, etc. convention, which is where FORmulaTRANslation got it (unless otherwise declared, variable names starting with i through n are integer).

And you might learn it indirectly from all the people and code that follow this convention. In my case, it was FORTRAN first, albeit perhaps in the same academic year 1977-8 where I was introduced to i, j, etc. in Algebra II.

Oh god, I've always thought that i stood for "index". And j...Well it is the most logical name for the next index. :D

It might, I don't know the origin of i, j etc. in math....

Actually it stands for "iterator" and j and k are alphabetically next so your assumption there is spot on. I worked at a company that had coding standards that were put in place by a group of people who said "you can't use 1 letter abbreviations as they don't make any sense" to which I replied with "unless your using an iterator in a loop". Exception found.

Oh thanks for clarifying that!

I use i,j for 2dimensional arrays in Java. I learned programming in ... 2010.

Or C or Java programmers... i and j are still the convention in all the mainstream imperative languages.

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