J for the iPhone! Hahaha. Just had to get that off my chest.
Back on topic. I'm supporting my nephew through college (studying Industrial Engineering) and two years ago, I gave him my old Dell Axim pocket pc (the one that died, I found an enterprising person who fixed it) and showed him J. I've forgotten about it and last Sunday ... I saw him fiddling around with it to realize that he's using J to solve engineering problems. He just used the manual and never even visited the J software website and never asked me questions about it. He also told me that some classmates who have pocket pc's have copied J and his IJS files. I do hope that this spreads, at least in his school (Adamson University). -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alan K. Stebbens Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2009 2:21 PM To: Chat forum Subject: [Jchat] Increasing Adoption and Usage ... And, if there's a J platform on lots of computers and PDAs, then developers will build more J packages to solve problems so that users do not even need to know that much about the J language itself, just use it as a platform. Need to keep track of expenses? you can spend $$$ for MS Excel, or you can use this handy J Expenses package. Need help managing your calorie tracking? Use this shareware J package that provides caloric estimates on many kinds of food, and helps you track your diet. Need to estimate your mortgage? Just load up the handy J mortgage calculator. This is how you create demand, and lower the barriers to adoption and usage. This is the approach that Wolfram has begun to follow -- getting variants of Mathematica into more markets and opportunities, except that they aren't very far along. I imagine they're having a hard time putting Mathematica into small devices without having the battery go dead in 15 seconds! :-) A good example of a portable, powerful, expressive, mathematical language is Frink. It runs on almost any portable computing device that supports Java, which includes most PDAs and smart phones. However, Frink is at the beginning of its lifetime, and there is no IDE, no set of common libraries, no large user base .. yet. I hope this has given some food for thought. I've admired J for personal reasons, and have been wanting to use J in my professional environment, but until recently, had not really clarified why I couldn't. I'm hoping that not too far in the future, I'll be able to make a different choice. -- Alan Stebbens ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
