Richard Donovan wrote: > As a "permanent J beginner" it seems to me that the cavalier way > in which existing systems are "broken" by new releases is possibly > one of the reasons that J has failed to make a wider impression into > the software scene. No business enterprise could possibly have > major systems written in J if it was likely that a new release of the > software would bring the walls tumbling down!
I think I disagree. There are hundreds or thousands of languages out there (depending on how you count distinct languages). Where there's a commercial success associated with a language it has almost nothing to do with the language itself. Furthermore, with J, a business retains the right to distribute copies of the runtime for previous versions. (I could also get into drastic things other software outfits have done with their products, but that would be more like a blame game than anything productive.) I agree that when withdrawing a feature it's good to have a transition release when the old behavior or the new behavior is available. I also agree that other approaches with this argument passing issue might be more viable than the approach in the current beta (perhaps waiting until the supported character set is larger and then apply the new behavior to the new characters, though if J went this direction, it should also get a "resolve this name in that locale" operator for both noun and verb references). But I think a lot of the hyperbole is based on a mis-understanding of what's been changed. I certainly don't see a serious "commercial rejection" issue here. An educational issue, sure. But commercial success depends on marketing, product positioning, customer support, solving business needs of your customers, etc. And that just doesn't seem relevant here, because no one is being forced to give up their older versions of J (and any application having a problem could be upgraded with relatively little effort.) -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
