Yes, and there is still place for programmers of the past, like you ;) Not every computer application has to have a slick interface, true. But considering computers as a big business, GUIs are ubiquitous in the industry, and in that sense APL/J are not adequate for the programming of today.
And GUIs were just one example. Nowadays computation requires working easily with huge amounts of heterogeneous data, and I may be wrong about this, but I don't think J's boxes are an adequate solution. On 01/09/2018 10:34 AM, Don Guinn wrote: APL was a major breakthrough in computing. As mentioned earlier it provided a better link between people and computers than was available at the time. It allowed people to think arrays with computers as mathematicians do. It also formalized the concept of modifiers, a concept in mathematics not exploited then or even now by most programming languages. But this thread is moving to the questions of GUI. In other words, it is more important to provide a glossy presentation of results than the reliability of the results. Now it is to the point on PCs that over 99.9% of processing time is accepting input and displaying results than on the problem. Present the results in a way that it is unnecessary for people to understand the problem being solved. On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 1:02 AM, Björn Helgason <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> wrote: JHS is using HTML as a front end. There are numerous ways of interacting with HTML tools. You can see examples and demos doing gui/graphics etc and mixing with javascripts. It may be difficult to distinguish between what is J/Javascript. On 8 Jan 2018 22:13, "Dabrowski, Andrew John" <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> wrote: After reading "Algebra as Language" and "Computers and Mathematical Notation", I'm starting to see J the perfect language for numerical computation. But for general purpose programming I can see Dijkstra's point. When APL was designed computers were seen largely as calculating machines. But by the 1970s GUIs were starting to be developed, and computers were being applied in areas where tensors were no longer adequate as the sole data structure. One thing general purpose programming languages must have is extensibility, and that J lacks. I'm trying to work out what the appropriate use cases are for J, and I think it's calculating with tensors. If you need more than tensors, or if you need more than calculation (e.g. GUIs), J is not a good choice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
