Who uses J -- and to what effect? Has it had its "killer app" written yet?
The answer is a resounding "yes". Maybe not "resounding" because nobody involved has gone public with their experiences. But J has powered one startup company I know of from scratch to an annual turnover of $Millions. And the product itself, which has gone under a variety of names, controls $billions worldwide via its many corporate customers. Look at the homepage: http://www.jsoftware.com/ and you see "Representative users". First on the list is Cognos... well, nowadays that ought to be IBM, because they bought Cognos in the last year or two. Thereby hangs quite a tale! I think Roger may have hinted at it recently on the forum, but forgive me if I expand on it a tiny bit. Mid-eighties, George Kunzle, a planner at IBM Cosham, took his pet system with him under the terms of a severance agreement with his employer, when IBM broke with a lifetime's staffing policy and laid-off staff worldwide. This was KPS -- Kunzle Planning System (http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v123/clark123_55.htm) -- superficially a sort of Excel, with one smart trick of its own. If you typed a new value into a computed cell, it "broke back" the resulting increment across all contributing cells on a "rational basis", the details being a commercial secret. Suffice to say that if you had a bottom-line figure for your entire corporation and you typed-in "-10%", that 10% cutback would allocate itself across all departments. That one single feature sold KPS like hot cakes in the middle of an IT recession. Even though KPS was an MSDOS app -- and the world had gone Windows. Around the mid 90s a new term: OLAP -- On-Line-Analytical Processing -- began being bandied about. Nobody was quite sure what OLAP was. But in spite of some smart publicity by Hyperion over their Essbase, everyone in financial planning knew that OLAP was nothing more or less than what AP did -- and others were trying to. KPS was implemented in VSAPL, ported to Dyalog APL when Kunzle left IBM. When Dyalog acquired Windows support, KPS was rebaptised AP -- Adaytum Planning -- at the behest of the marketing department (...silly name, we thought!) and released its first Windows version, cutting the teeth of the Grid Object, the flagship feature of Dyalog release 9 (if I recall). The teeth-cutting was so painful that AP could well be said to have been at the bleeding edge. Get-togethers between the two firms were distinguished by appeals to leave pistols at the door. But APL suffered from some grave drawbacks in the role, which couldn't just be re-coded away. The APL workspace, mainly. Starting with a C/C++ engine to manage the allocation of non-workspace memory to customer data, AP progressively shed APL from the guts of the app, eventually replacing the calculation engine (with its wonder break-back feature) with one implemented in J. Now although having been intimately involved with the calculation engine in its APL form, I know nothing in detail about the J version. But I'd envisage huge scope for gerunds, function assignment, freedom from workspace limitations and (for use in break-back) ^:_1 . Adaytum was taken over around 2003 by Cognos for $50M, if memory serves. Subsequently IBM bought out Cognos, incidentally getting their own cast-out financial planning system back in gorgeous adulthood. So J users have no need to feel ashamed of their pet "perversion", as many a Java junkie would have it. J throbs away at the beating heart of some of the world's largest corporations. IBM too now, probably. Though that's a company that is very secretive about what it does. Ian 2010/2/3 Björn Helgason <[email protected]>: > I have no information on the number of J systems installed and used. > > All of us who love J want it to do well and everyone get something out of it. > > There seem to be ever more people using it for one thing or another. > > Are we making money out of using J? > Who is making money with J? > How are we making money with J? > Are we sharing the money we make with J? > How do we share the money we make with J? > How can we help ISI make more money with J? > > It is relatively easy to come up with the questions but it can be a > bit more difficult to come up with answers. > > Who are making money with software and how? > > It is probably similar with people making films and music. > > The film industry is not making as much of their revenues from people > going to the cinemas anymore. > > The music industry is not getting all its money from selling records. > > Those making money on the net seem to get much of their money selling > advertisements. > > Quite a lot of money seems to be in computer games. > > I went to a M$ conference last week. > > Everyone showing off products seemed to be selling the same thing, > management reports using very similar tools to access data already > stored in databases. > > The people talking saying the same things they have been saying over many > years. > > "The systems we are selling now are a lot improved over the systems we > were selling last year because last years systems were so hard to > use." > > Then there were also several lotteries to let you win something if you > answered the question why their company was so much better than all > the others and give them your e-mail so they could send you more > information. > > Most did not even bother with the questions. > > I won a pen to point at slides and change slides remotely through an > usb connected device. > > Pretty neat. > > Do we have enough traffic on some web pages that could attract people > to advertise? > > -- > Björn Helgason, Verkfræðingur > Fornustekkum II > 781 Hornafirði > Po Box 127,801 Selfoss , > t-póst: [email protected] > gsm: +3546985532 > sími: +3544781286 > http://groups.google.com/group/J-Programming > > > Tæknikunnátta höndlar hið flókna, sköpunargáfa er meistari einfaldleikans > > góður kennari getur stigið á tær án þess að glansinn fari af skónum > /|_ .-----------------------------------. > ,' .\ / | Með léttri lund verður | > ,--' _,' | Dagurinn í dag | > / / | Enn betri en gærdagurinn | > ( -. | `-----------------------------------' > | ) | (\_ _/) > (`-. '--.) (='.'=) ♖♘♗♕♔♙ > `. )----' (")_(") ☃☠ > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
