Just thinking out loud about how to generate more exposure for J.
I am sure it is a common experience amongst J'ers, the frustration that
hardly any body has heard of or uses it. People seem to take its low
exposure as an indication of its low quality or worth and then refuse to
even look into it ... as though the rule of the mob ever resulted in good
decisions! No mention of any recent election results from this Ron Paul
advocate ;-)).
Sometimes people who only use "__ generation languages" (joke) such as
Python, C++, Matlab expect you to start talking about grassy knolls in the
next sentence if you mention J ... following the standard conversation where
you have explained that J is not short for Java.
The PostGreSLQ database allows the creation of functions in popular
languages, Perl, TCL, Python ...
A very simple, and poorly written, example of using embedded Python to read
data from yahoo reads,
create or replace function yahooread ()
returns text
as $$
import httplib
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("ichart.finance.yahoo.com")
conn.request("GET",
"/table.csv?s=GE&d=31&e=1&f=2020&g=d&a=1&b=1&c=2008&ignore=.csv")
r1 = conn.getresponse()
conn.close()
data1=r1.read()
return data1
$$
language plpythonu;
select yahooread from yahooread();
It occurs to me that when people read the PostGreSQL manual and see that it
is compatible with Perl, Python and TCL then it works as an advertisement,
even an endorsement of those languages.
To that end I was wondering how much effort it would take to make J appear
in the list of supported languages in popular software ... which hopefully
would eventually make J more acceptable to the mainstream.
Why make it more popular? Well firstly because I enjoy using it and if it
was more popular then more employers would pay more of us more money to do
something we enjoy; secondly because it would increase the number of
developers making libraries which again in beneficial to people who enjoy J.
I am no expert in how to make languages talk to each other or to make this
kind of language embedding occur, but am just thinking that in order to
generate more exposure for J then providing ways to use it inside other
popular systems like PostGreSQL would be a great way to increase the user
base - or at least to get people to go to the jsoftware website and check it
out - because J would appear in the manuals of all of those languages.
I also note that there are many wiki pages that could have a reference to J
added to them e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matlab has a list of
languages at the bottom. I do not know how to edit wiki pages but it occurs
to me that J could appear at the bottom of that page.
It definitely should appear on but is absent from this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numerical_analysis_software
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