Hi Paul, I am afraid I am unable to quickly translate Einstein's wise words into a "To Do" list for making our languages more popular. But I will keep it in mind ;-)
I think that a discussion of the relative merits of (the interfaces and tools provided with) my favourite language vs. J would be inappropriate in this forum. But I will say that the things you mention as "real life with J" (Getting stuff out of Spreadsheets, using regular expressions, graphics, ODBC/ADO/ADO.Net) sound indistinguishable from "real life with APL". For educational use (Dyalog) APL is free and personal use, "almost free". And fairly quick. The J community has done a GREAT job of collecting labs and other examples, and writing manuals and documents - we've had our nose a bit too close to the ground servicing the existing user base, and adding things that the commercial folks want in the short term. We all have work to do. Morten -----Original Message----- From: Paul Gauthier [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 19. december 2007 16:36 To: 'Chat forum' Subject: RE: Re[Jchat] adable J My personal opinion on "THE" reason comes from a quote: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." -- Albert Einstein. The rest is trivial. Most people want the impossible and settle for a poor substitute. PS: I agree that APL is visually easier for me but as long as it's harder to get a kdb database in APL for instance, there is little to compare between say K and APL. Each one has it's useful niche... J is more difficult to classify and seems to be my favorite laboratory for experimentations because of all those little pieces like tara, regular expressions etc. Which makes it easy to explore "had hoc" solutions quickly and it's free. Basically for me, things go like this in real life (with J): - Oh! I need something to transform that spreadsheet... Let's try tara. - I see... Some fuzziness requires regular expressions searches and substitutions, ok let's do that... - I wonder if I can add this graphic, let's see what Oleg came up with... - Oh no! Now I would need to transfer stuff to a database, ok let's see maybe with ODBC or should I use SQLite ? etc. Now try to imagine doing this with APL or K ? Will it still be quick and free ? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Morten Kromberg Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 8:24 AM To: 'Chat forum' Subject: RE: Re[Jchat] adable J (leaving the un-adable subject line intact to keep this stream separate from the one about symbols) BobGraf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I sincerely believe that APL, and its successor, J, have both failed in > popularity for reasons having nothing to do with technical issues, but > rather with issues related to sales and marketing of the APL and J products. I think it is true that marketing of APL and J has been less successful than it could have been. But the reasons are quite complex, and in my opinion they have little to do with the popular myths regarding character sets, lack of open source versions, and other ideas that have been suggested as "THE" reason why the languages have not become more popular. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
