This is a real "blast from the past" for me!
It is very similar to problems I attacked with APL when I first
encountered it in 1968.... I was working in instrumentation design in a
product test group in IBM Boulder.
In one case, I acquired an H/P instrument called a Nuclear Multichannel
Analyzer - a large, very expensive machine with 8,192 bins similar in
function to the little credit card sized device shown in Beau Webber's
video.
Going the other direction, I wrote compilers for very specialized
gadgets to create intentionally distorted data, then used APL to analyze
the result of processing that data (e.g. in a magnetic tape recording).
In place of the USB connection, our problem was to get data into a
mainframe... That caused me to find Shared Variables and a whole new
career direction...
With J on things like the Blackberry Pi, this gets even more interesting.
Thanks for the pointer!
On 2013/07/09 09:59 , Devon McCormick wrote:
Here's a more current link to Beau: http://aplwiki.com/BeauWebber
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
There's this guy Beau Webber - who I've seen speak - who uses APL to
handle the real-time output of various kinds of lab equipment:
http://www.element14.com/community/blogs/Dr.BeauWebber/tags/apl .
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 12:42 PM, I.T. Daniher <[email protected]>wrote:
JHS is a really neat concept for doing interactive data exploration,
especially with tools like https://github.com/jordantirrell/D3-for-J and
'graphics/plots' canvas backend.
Most of the data with which I work is grabbed live, off of hardware, via
various bindings I've been writing. (
https://github.com/itdaniher/JNotebook/blob/master/libusb.ijs,
https://github.com/itdaniher/JNotebook/blob/master/cee.ijs,
https://github.com/itdaniher/JNotebook/blob/master/librtlsdr.ijs)
Unfortunately, the collection of data isn't always a low-overhead task, so
I've largely been stuck with vim and jconsole, where my prototyping
workflow consists of writing an experiment, running the script, and
viewing
/ processing the resulting data. This is perhaps more a petition for
better
threading / async support in J in general, but I've found JHS and the
other
J IDEs to be ill suited to a more realtime/interactive paradigm due to UI
requests, and in some cases, interaction with the text editor window
itself, being blocked by "long-running" data collection.
For an example of the sort of experiments I'm working to facilitate, check
out http://www.nonolithlabs.com/blog/2012/09-19-software-features, an old
post from my now largely defunct startup, which was working to provide
makers and learners with tools to poke and prod the world at the level of
voltage and current, and interpret the results to build better
understanding of electronics and physics. We worked extensively to build a
very tight and low-latency connection between physical hardware and
graphical representations of information streams. J would be a tool to
expand that paradigm to involve mathematical stream processing, but I
haven't been able to figure out how to realize the necessary concurrency
bit with J, as-is.
I started learning J about two months ago, inspired by a friend who worked
with IBM to standardize early drafts of APL. I love the language, but it's
clearly not a systems language, and the lack of async / threading
paradigms
has made it difficult to fully realize some of the concepts I was hoping
to
explore. I'd love advice on how to proceed!
Thanks,
--
Ian
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Eric Iverson <[email protected]
wrote:
JHS is single threaded. The javascript code / ajax request / J code
all run in the same thread. This was easy and convenient for the
original JHS proof of concept.
This would be easy to relax in many different ways with multiple
threads in javascript. Did you have particular requirements in mind?
There are so many possibilties that it would help to have a concrete
project to think about.
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 11:55 AM, I.T. Daniher <[email protected]>
wrote:
Question I've been meaning to ask about JHS - AFAIK, the code written
runs
in the same thread that handles the AJAX requests. If this is indeed
the
case, is there any plan to change the situation?
Thanks!
--
Ian
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Eric Iverson <
[email protected]
wrote:
I :) use JHS all the time and think it has a bright and secure
future.
I'm happy with the codemirror text editor currently available in JHS.
It is fast and has undo/redo, find/replace, ctrl key shortcuts for
save and run, syntax coloring, etc.
Thanks for the ymacs reference. It looks interesting and would be a
nice addition to JHS. Hooking codemirror to the JHS framework was
less
that a days work. I hope someone interested in ymacs will try it out
in JHS. I'd be happy to answer questions and give pointers, but think
the codemirror example might be all that is needed.
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 6:33 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]>
wrote:
jhs might use http://www.ymacs.org/
Does anyone still use jhs?
--
Raul
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