Hi Vijay - Thanks for the sharing your views. It's always good to hear from new enthusiasts. Those of us who have been doing this for a long time sometimes feel like we're shouting into the wind, so it's good to feel that the community's efforts are appreciated.
I especially appreciate your acknowledgement that much of what we do in other languages and environments constitutes wasting our time on minutiae. I have to work in other languages because of work - though I do some J here as well - and feel very keenly the time wasted when I have to code up a five- or ten-character J solution in ten or twenty lines of code. I was recently perusing the J contributions on "dailyprogrammer" (e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer/comments/2rfae0/20150105_challenge_196_practical_exercise_ready/) from "Godspiral" and, comparing the his few lines of J to others' pages of C++ or Java, I remain astonished that this disparity doesn't raise more curiosity about J. Regards, Devon On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:04 PM, Vijay Lulla <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > I came across the below article by the way of Hacker News. > http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234 > > I'd like to share a couple of my views about J community. I came across J > sometime in 2012 by the way of projecteuler.net. As I learned a little bit > of the J language I realized that I was spending (wasting?) a lot of time > on minutiae in other languages/environments! I kept at it and now J is my > favorite language and I use it almost daily. There are a couple of things > very unique about J: the awesome community, and the amount of interesting > material that this community has generated. > > I'm also very impressed with the community's interest in always tying many > lessons/insights to its roots. This is unique, at least IMO to J (probably > to APL too but I couldn't say since I've not used it). And the more I read > about people like Ken Iverson, Ian Sharp, and Eugene McDonnell I'm even > more impressed. These guys could not help being geniuses...but they chose > to be excellent human beings (Ken Iverson's gesture of dingy bills > [mentioned in Beginnings in http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm], Ian > Sharp's overall attitude [as listed in > http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/IPSA50.htm], and McDonnell's efforts to > make J accessible/fun)! I don't think I can find better role models (in > programming and real life) to emulate. > > I don't know why I felt compelled to share this with all of you. I guess, > just to tell you that all your work/efforts have impacted me, very > positively, and I appreciate it, as I'm sure many others do, very much. > > Thanks, > Vijay. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
