Hi Raul & Tracy,
Thank you for reading and commenting on my material. I do read your
comments and they do help steer my course. Thank you for listening.
Obviously, as my knowledge increases, my position changes. I have
found, as Ric suggested, that by now the two character primitives don't
bother me nearly as much. I accept the benefits of tacit J. I
am slowly becoming like other J users. I am inside the box with you.
However, as I have gained knowledge, I have lost the view
from outside the box - what is seen by a new J user. Two things
originally put me off:
1) The two character primitives.
2) Being told that when I wished to create a verb from the expression:
%<:#y , for example, I needed a conjunction to join each verb:
Function =: %@:<:@:# .
There is probably nothing unique about my perceptions - the
only difference I have from others is that when I meet something
that I think needs changing, I feel passionately about the need to
try to see it changed.
Had I seen an alternative system that was easily available or
had I not been interested in seeing what Ken Iverson's later years
had produced, I would have been gone quickly, without ever
knowing the quality of J.
There is a huge market for a system that is easy to use, flexible
and powerful. Someone else will supply such a system if
Jsoftware does not do it. And it is not quality that survives;
it's wide use.
I was really pleased to see this statement from Raul:
"In my opinion we do have a problem with ascii -- it's rather
ugly and does not give us very many distinct characters
to work with. When unicode gets sufficiently adopted that
everyone can use some subset of utf-8 without having to
worry about bom or mime types or editors or keyboards
mappings or font installation, then this problem will go
away, and J can be modified to use those characters. Right
now, however, the only universally viable subset of utf-8 is
ascii."
It makes a lot of sense and obviously Raul has a lot more
credibility than I do.
I will have another attempt at my second issue in a
subsequent email. I need to clean up my position after
reading your comments in the hope that I can find
something that the two of you will support.
Thanks,
Don
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