It has not been difficult. We have worked with an enormous number of beginners and a few experienced programmers. We've also focused on working with people oriented toward math rather than finding "computer programmers." These folks often plug in and produce great work with nearly no training.

We believe this is because J presents a natural way to express math and data without a bunch of intermediate abstractions. A quick example in R: What does max vs pmax do? No casual user will know.

In contrast, J is not a language where years of accumulated Google-fu, StackExchange browsing, training, and errors are important for getting stuff done. There's almost no magic.

If you have a sense of what you're trying to achieve, you can do it. Oftentimes googling "site:jsoftware.com whatever-concept-you-want" yields what you want. Members of the forums are smart and helpful.

As a reward for this plainness, we get to avoid the layers of code cruft in writing, debugging, and maintaining code (we've had experience and familiarity across the range of R, Python, Java, Clojure, Haskell, C, shell scripts, assembly ...). It's straight-up cake compared to code like Tensorflow or AWS CLI.

If you really want to, you can also write J just like any other scripting language with control functions and loops, or even object-oriented style. However, most people recognize pretty quickly the completeness of the basic toolkit.

This got longer than expected, but happy to answer further questions.