2009/11/3 Matthew Brand <[email protected]>: > Well, whatever the reasonings, it would be nice to be able to put a number > to the phrase "small user base".
You can put whatever number you like. One thing is certain and that number is growing and there are all kinds of signs you can use to notice how it is growing. If you look over time you can count the number of messages that have been sent to forums. Discussions about J are carried out in many forums and news groups and over the years there are more and more help and lab texts produced in wikis and there are more and more demos and addons. If you like it with growth of plants and trees it is not the fastest growing that are always the best or most beautiful. The trees that grow slowly become the giants of the woods and add one more ring each your and outgrow everything else. J is a branch of APL and as such has been growing steadily for a number of years before the start of J. I am very much interested in the next generation of J that will make it easier to use several J sessions on several machines all over the world. Like you would have one main session and send tasks to different machines. I am sure that facility will make even more people use J without knowing they are using J. It is similar to the situation with Linux. Most people are using Linux every day without knowing that their questions sent to servers that are running Linux. Similarly applications you are using could be written in J or APL without your knowledge of what it is witten in. So indirectly a lot of people could be APL or J users without knowing it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
