Great story! It shows, if not distracted, one can accomplish a lot. :)
But really, "If you build it, he will come." ----- Original Message ---- > From: Alex Rufon <[email protected]> > > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
