I too get the same feeling. I only get support from people not coming in from a programming background or doesn't have a .NET programmer as an advisor. I've had recommended J to engineering students, some old classmates who's into statistics and some teacher friends. The funny thing is, my ward who's studying engineering is using it in his pocket pc and my friend who's primarily a teacher and taking her PHD actually dropped R and switched to J. One notable thing is, both these person never asked me about J again after I introduced it to them ... but after a while showed me how they were using J in what they do.
I even showed them the J mailing list and they didn't sign up. Hehehe. Me and my wife had this discussion for a while now and one of the conclusions is that because J is not mainstream. I mean besides us dinosaurs in the office, we actually have a high turnover of programmers. Particularly with the freeze hiring for permanent positions ... we have a lot of contractual over the years and they tend to concentrate on what's NEW from Microsoft since they would need that NEW skill for their next job. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matthew Brand Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 5:24 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Jchat] [Jprogramming] The way we think I have found programmers to be extremely hostile to J. I do not know where that comes from. It is very strange. It is like sitting next to a man almost dying of thirst who has only a moist sponge to suck on and you offer him a glass of water, but he says, "no thanks, I will continue to suck on the sponge ... that is what all the others did before they died of thirst, nobody else is drinking water. Besides, I don't want to have to teach the next guy how to drink water from a glass, he will already be trained to suck on sponges." 2009/8/21 Steven Taylor <[email protected]>: > I had to share this. Using J I was recently able to solve an n-dimensional > mapping problem using a J array with a shape vector. The solution needed 4 > operations. Moving this back to the C / C# world the other developer > couldn't see that it was a complete solution. Instead he is now busy > recreating this in an inefficient tree, or as I suggested, if it must be > this way, go ahead and use a hash map. > "This isn't the way you do it in .net", he said. "You need references and > pointers", he continued. In his own words he wanted to go for a "zero > intelligence solution"... but it seems to me more like, "zero intelligence > but how can I use all the fancy new toys to make it more complex". Oh, and > substitute "more complex" with "more maintainable" to > be politically correct. > > --Steven > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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
