Dan, Thank you for saying what you have said. They mirror my joy of J, my appreciation of the J team and community, and my dislike of C. Of late I have been attempting to learn objective-C, having never really studied C, and what an experience that is. But the challenge keeps me off the street.
On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 :) > > -- (B=) <-----my sig Brian Schott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
