The inability to create an EXE file from a project is a key problem to using it in a commercial environment. Being able to give an EXE file to your boss would make it politically much easier for junior people to use J in a commercial environment.
Usually the boss says what he wants the program to do, but he does not care how you do it. He usually does not know anything about programming beyond excel cell formulas will just want you to give him a file whose icon he can double-click or a button in an excel worksheet to click on to call a VBA macro. He absolutely does not want to have to (or have to sit and watch you do it) "setup", or "install" or "set the path variable" or "download libraries x,y,z" - he wants something that just works. He also does not want an update of seemingly unrelated programs/libraries to stop the program from working properly (as is common with Java - re the large font problem). If J had a way to create an executable file with no external dependencies then it would be easier to get people using it in commercial environments for in-house projects. On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Oleg Kobchenko <[email protected]> wrote: > > Most of languages, even C/C++ (in shared DLL mode), > require more than one separate files. > > While single EXE, albeit a rare trick, could satifsy > a few developers, it not clear that it would be critical > to wide adoption of a platform. > >> From: Björn Helgason <[email protected]> >> >> I see no harm in imitating VB and such if that is what people want to do. > > I don't think VB is just a single EXE--it requires VB runtime, > which is a number of DLLs, typically installed in Windows folder. > I had problems with that on machines, which did not have those > DLLs already present. To avoid this VB requires to make a setup > distribution. > > >> From: Fraser Jackson <[email protected]> >> >> >> Bjorn wrote: >> >> > Lots of people do want it and over the year that has been one of the >> > primary >> > obstacles against using APL is not having a feature like that. >> > >> > Dyalog has given us this feature so in a way you could create a Dyalog APL >> > application that would call J en create an exe. >> > >> >> R has been an outsanding example of development of a user community. In the >> first issue of the R Journal http://journal.r-project.org/ which has just >> been issued, John Chambers ( a major designer of S on which R was initially >> based, writes about issues being discussed here from the perspective of the >> R community. >> >> He states that the absence of the feature Bjorn has wants - ability to >> execute *.exe files from within APL was one of the primary reasons they did >> not base their development on APL. > > We need to be careful about mixing terms. Bjorn Helgason wants stand-alone > single EXE apps. And John Chambers referred to a totally different > limitation of APL--to call Fortran routines from within itself. > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
