Yes, my apologies for being unclear, and giving the impression that Martin's IDE is not valuable and that somehow he should have been doing something else with his time. That wasn't my intention at all!
To be clear: I think QJIDE is very neat (I installed it yesterday - it's about the 5th piece of software I've put on my new laptop) and I'm glad to have it. Like Martin, I'm a bit of a desktop-app dinosaur and am feeling the urge to update my skills and mindset and move to the webapp world. J is one of the few desktop apps I have left. QJIDE might help me shed that last addiction (I prefer its visual layout to JHS'; it makes the workflow more familiar to me, and will soften the learning curve). Time will tell of I can actually get off desktop-J, but in any case I'm glad to have QJIDE. The source code discussion I started was simply misplaced in this thread; Murray's post just gave me an unexpected opportunity to raise an issue that's been bothering me for a while. As Martin notes below, and Chris explicitly told us, the sole motivation behind the last two versions of J has been to get the user base onto a new frontend. The language proper hasn't changed since J6. The last version of J6 was released in 2008. But if you look at the release notes, that was mostly a performance and bugfix release. The last version of J to introduce novelty into the language was J6.01, of NVV fame (also dyad I.), released in 2006! Again, so that I don't create the impression that I'm knocking anyone: I am not suggesting Jsoftware (neither Roger, Eric, nor Chris) is doing anything wrong or should have done something differently. They've given us a wonderful thing, which I personally value greatly, and I am indebted to them. I use J every day. I would like to keep using J every day, for many years to come. I am concerned that won't be possible if we let the language stagnate. My earlier posts were intended to highlight that risk. -Dan PS: Tom, point taken! Perhaps it's time to re-learn C. Though I cringe at the irony of learning C in order to use J, a language I adopted because I hate using C-like languages :) Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device. On Mar 8, 2013, at 6:57 AM, "Martin Saurer" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I try to answer some questions/feedback comments: > > > @All: > Many thanks for the feedback. > > > @Ric Sherlock: > Sorry for the missing hint that the "convert/json" add-on has to be > installed. > I have always all the add-ons installed, so I never miss one ;-) > > > @Bill Lam: > It seems, you have a bin32 and bin64 folder, isn't it? > Please take a look at line 62-64 of qjide.py. > You may edit these lines so they match your J installation (for now). > I will keep that in mind for a next release of qjide. > > As of March, 8th 2013, there are two parts: > - The IDE (runtime): qjide_20130308.zip > - The Source Code: qjide_source_20130308.zip > Please take a look at the wiki page. > > I have successfully unzipped qjide_20130308.zip using the unzip command on > Linux (Ubuntu 10.04, unzip version 6.00). > > It's my intention to add some features, if time permits. > I cannot specify any time frame for that now. > To make it part of the JAL or not, is up to the community > and feedback I receive ;-) > > @All: > It looks like some people seems to be a little concerned about another J > IDE. > For me, there were two goals, to create it: > > 1. I wanted to see whether it is possible or not, to create a J IDE > using the Qooxdoo AJAX framework. > > 2. Each major J release (since J6) changed the GUI toolkit: > J6: wd > J7: gtk > J8: qt (wd again, but somewhat different from J6) > J9: ??? > Please correct me, if I'm wrong. > I have a lot of J programs which are based on GUI functionality. > So I had to rewrite the GUI part for each major release. > There's nothing wrong about that, but I would love to have a > J GUI toolkit that survives some major releases ;-) > > Please keep in mind, that nobody is urged to use qjide. > It's a personal experiment, and I like to share it with the community. > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
