I really think a dependable, cohesive IRC community would be a boon to J, particularly for garnering and retaining new talent. But J IRC community didn't pan out.
I think that was mostly because we didn't have enough participants, and I think we didn't have many participants because of the technological hurdles associated with IRC. But I think we can solve that. There have been websites that serve IRC for years, but only with the advent of AJAX have they become really useful (before AJAX, web pages didn't lend themselves well as highly responsive, interactive, desktop-type applications). But now it's easy. For example, to connect to the official J chat room: 1. Visit http://www.mibbit.com 2. Select "Freenode" from the Servers dropdown (it's in the "techies section", about halfway down). 3. Type #jsoftware in the channel field. 4. (Optional) change the username in the username field to something you like 5. Press connect That's it. You're in. Now try typing: jeval: +/i.10 Voila. You now have an interactive J session in your favorite browser. You don't even have to install J! In fact, this is so useful, I would like to request that JSoftware embed the IRC window at http://www.jsoftware.com . The mibbit.com guys made this a snap too (kind of like how nabble.com makes it easy to embed the Forums). If Jsoftware agrees, I'll help them set it up, along with a second embeded window which will just be a pure J interpreter for newbies to splash around in (and JSoftware won't have to maintain anything!). How many other programming languages just let you take a test drive from their webpage? (How many could, unless they are succinct and fundamentally based on interactive development?) The future's so bright I'll have to wear sunglasses. -Dan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
