I've nearly finished my editing task on Edn 2 of "At Play With J", as
I originally saw it, and I want to thank everybody involved in this
monumental effort to bring the code up-to-date. Leaving aside the J
community, for which I can't vouch, the BAA has attempted nothing to
match it since the I-APL project -- which as some of you may remember
produced a lot of excellent classroom materials as well as its tiny
(32KB) ISO standard language processor.
I was aiming to publish the book just in time for the British APL
Association conference BAPLA09 at Reading this coming Monday 8 June...
but I've been in denial over a final necessary step, which I haven't
allowed due time for. Someone needs to go line-by-line through the PDF
generated by Lulu.com, which is both the e-book and the camera copy,
and copy/paste the code into J602 -- as it comes straight out of the
box. Not user-configured, say, to accept deprecated syntax. There is
no time to do this properly before Monday, so I'm not even going to
try. My publication date is hereby put back to Vector 24.2. (24.1 has
just been published).
Not to do this final step is to spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar
-- and believe me, it is a ship worth launching. Not only for the
effort by many that has gone into it, but also to honour the eminence
of the original work. There are a number of fine books on J, as I'm
only now beginning to appreciate, but Gene's opus is uniquely
motivating -- as I'm sure we'll all agree. I myself have been
converted by it from a total J rabbit to someone who can now
reasonably contemplate releasing a serious app.
Put like that, APWJ Edn 2 *is* a serious app... and a few last-minute
glitches (...would you believe there is more than one caret in
unicode? ...okay, okay -- so you all know about APL {AND}) have
convinced me it needs a final independent test like every serious app
gets. And since I take ultimate responsibility for this product to
work, the tester has to be me. It's right and proper that I should
leave a smooth path for other rabbits to follow. (Not a trail of
droppings ;-)
But, rabbit though I am, I face my task with confidence. For each of
the 41 chapters I now have a name to approach if I get bogged down.
Please don't be miffed if I privately call on you asking for help over
a glitch I've discovered... 9 times out of 10 it won't be your fault.
All of you whose names appear on
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/At%20Play%20With%20J will be
acknowledged in the book. I'm sorry that BAA funds won't stretch right
now to a paperback each, but you'll certainly be entitled to a free
ebook.
Once again... thank you, one and all, for a fine effort.
Ian Clark
Subeditor, At Play With J, Edn 2, Vector Books 2009.
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