I think you make some good points, and it is worth introspecting J's current position. I don't think J will ever be a mainstream language, and it should never be intended to be so. Some quick comments on some of your points:
0: I never understood why the name J was chosen. It is search engine unfriendly. However, what's done is done, and you can always use "jlang" in searches. Renaming the language would cause too much confusion. Besides J is in good company (C,D,K,R). 1: jsoftware's homepage is pretty dreary looking, and it could do with a facelift (even just using bootstrap.js would help). I would gladly help out if needed. The J Dictionary is incredibly difficult to use. I find it is easiest to do everything through Nuvoc and the thru to dictionary link. Without Nuvoc I would be lost. 6: I love the labs... when they work, which is another issue. It seems J is moving pretty fast and some things are getting left behind. This is excusable as J's community is so small. 7: I agree. this should be on, or near, jsoftware's front page. 9: Error messages are often not particularly helpful, but I usually find the error itself is easy to spot once the error message is shown. Also the dissect tool is very good at figuring out where errors are. J has a small community, but it is hardly dead. And J is still useful. I absolutely prefer using J to other similar tools (numpy, R). It is also infuriating, and lack of libraries makes some tasks that would be simple in other languages, very difficult in J. If I were to suggest J were to head in any direction now, it would be to add CUDA / GPU bindings to allow J to use fast array ops on GPUs. I know Pascal wrote ArrayFire bindings a while back [0]. It would also be good for J to have some sort of Machine Learning framework. I think "frameworks" in general, are anathema to the APL/J way of doing things. i.e. you are supposed to make your own "framework" from the primitives, but other than some enthusiasts, the great mass of programmers don't have time, or care to do this. [0] https://github.com/Pascal-J -------------------------------------------- On Thu, 3/1/18, james faure <[email protected]> wrote: Subject: [Jchat] Where is J going ? To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Thursday, March 1, 2018, 11:40 AM Andrew Dabrowski is right. If J continues to steer it's current course, it will be quickly forgotten. Roger Hui himself seems to have abandonned J (correct me if I am mistaken), in favor of Dyalog APL. I can vouch from first hand experience how incredibly difficult it is to interest my friends in J and in fact have yet to get a single other person from Epitech http://international.epitech.eu/ to learn J, even though I believe they are convinced of it's power. Epitech International<http://international.epitech.eu/> international.epitech.eu Dear International Students, We will be happy to welcome you to Epitech and hope you will enjoy this unique learning experience! Epitech has solidified its reputation ... Since I seem to be by far the youngest person with a serious interest in J, I will try to explain my understanding of the current situation, in the hope that it may be useful to jsoftware. I also must say that between the time that I heard of J and commited to learning it, I was extremely unsure about whether the language would have a future and whether it would be suitable to do everything. Ultimately, Henry Rich's success story is the reason I am here, without it I would probably still be wondering to myself from time to time about J, but without the conviction that it is suitable, or worth learning. Project Euler also played a big part, and seems to be the main place where people first hear about J nowadays. And even with those conditions being met, If I learned J, it is only because I am both extremely determined, and was able to complete school projects with plenty of spare time. I have shown J to many people at Epitech, but I remain the only person who uses it, most of those people never made it past the first few steps. The learning curve has to be reduced, and it must be done so in the style of this decade. As an aside, on proofreading this, some of my statements are harsh, so please keep in mind they are not criticisms, more like a plea for help on J's behalf. Also please do not think me arrogant because of my convictions. I am well aware that I am not affiliated with nor in charge of jsoftware. My initial statement at the beginning of the long thread in the source forum about generators expressed my surprise at J's lack of optimization for such a simple case as '>:i.1000x'. I have mentionned multiple times that extended precision calculations are simply far too slow, and this has even threatened my desire to continue with J by throwing some serious doubts on it's ability to satisfy my needs. But the greatest threat to J's existence is it's complete failure to keep up with modern trends: 0 The name 'J' is now exposed as being idiotic - it is very difficult to make google understand what one means by 'J'. In fact I am forced to preface every google search with 'site:jsoftware', which is no doubt sufficiently annoying to put off many people. The language must be renamed. 1 The website looks decades old, and it is difficult to find things. Some people I have shown J to abandonned the attempt after a bare minute of visiting it. 2 Stack Overflow, and more generally Q&A resources are extremely popular nowadays, most people are simply too lazy to read documentation and will always try to formulate their question to google first. Should this prove unsuccessful, they are often much less motivated to continue. J has almost no presence on SO. 3 The Foreign's in J and the interface to this are frankly an abherration: nobody wants to have to learn or look up all the time how to activate this and that foreign, and there is no reason why they shouldn't all have much more logical names. In the same vein: the o. family must be given logical names like 'cos' 'sin' etc.. The concern of polluting the namespace is a miniscule one. I also would urge everyone to stop using phrases like '2 o. y', and '6!:2' etc.. but for that to happen, these need standard default names, even multiple aliases. Noone cares nowadays about the miniscule performance loss associated with having multiple equivalent names, the possibility of guessingand have it work anyway is far more important. 4 The SC based system has has got to go.. A modern program should certainly not depend on strict formulation rules in order to run optimally 5 Information needs to be presented differently, and in a way more in keeping with modern trends for webdesign. NuVoc is magnificent, and I very much appreciate the significant effort that has gone into explaining J, but the website's overall presentation is not good. 6 People nowadays are too lazy to download the qtide and try the labs, (not my learning style but for sure they are valuable) 7 Why isn't there an online Jconsole that can be used interactively, on jsoftware's frontpage ?? The closest thing I could find is the 3rd party https://tio.run/#j This comes back to the concept that If Newcomers are not sufficiently hooked in within 5 seconds, you lose them forever. 8 There must be bulitin help in the jconsole. Even if it bloats the binary, builtin help is obligatory for J. (something like help '/' should print some example uses of insert and a brief summary) 9 Error messages are incomprehensible to newcomers (why does 'Rank error' not also print the offending verb, it's rank, and the offending nouns + their ranks ?) - experienced users are happy to use the debug interface, but this shouldn't be necessary. 10 The Jsources are written in a magnificent style, but need many more explanations (I understand the jdevs are aware of this). 11 Developping J-otherlang communication is a good idea, but given the current situation it feels like an admission of defeat. Maybe there is no solution for J. Perhaps the timing is wrong, and it must lie dormant, biding it's time before one day in the future rising up again, in a new form. All we can do now is believe J is worth fighting for. I close this by saying I have the utmost respect for all Jers, but things must change, and radically if J is to live. J4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
