It's more an issue of todsacerdoti not checking their submission titles will fit, they do this a lot with their submissions. Abbreviating titles is not frowned upon when they don't fit, I've never had any reverted to something like this submission's title because I (for instance) shortened "United States" to "US" to shave off 11 characters.

In this case, cutting out the superfluous "programming language" part would get you "Understanding-j: An introduction to J that gets to the point" which would fit just fine. When in doubt, include the original title in a comment to explain the edit and let the mods sort it out later.