Thank you for all your responses! My thoughts are:
1. Give up engineering and teach J in math classes in schools. This is not
an opportunity open to me, I'm afraid Linda, for several reasons. I think I
will serve everybody best by focusing on my particular problem and helping
my colleagues to understand the issues.
2. Bo, your advice is straight forward, and refusing to translate it is open
to me. The job's been done, it's been used and it works. But there is a
reluctance on their part to want me to develop it further. They have only
*suggested* I might translate it into Python.
3. The cost in my time to rewrite in Python would be immense, educational,
taxing on a 68 year old, and could be very frustrating. I think I may begin
without being paid just to get a glimpse of the scale of the task and to
weigh up Python v. J. If they really wanted it badly, hiring a good Python
programmer to help me, as Raul suggested, would be well worthwhile, and good
fun.
4. David and Boyko touch on the conundrum, which is J thinking v. orthodox
(e.g. Python) thinking. My engineering colleagues are not interested in
this. They don't see this conundrum. They don't much like programming. They
like being successful at engineering. Python looks friendly and J doesn't.
Sure, this is a superficial view, but they are not interested in programming
languages or major differences between them. Indeed, they don't believe
there are major differences between any of them.
5. So I have a mind to do more or less what Don Kelly suggests.
a. Learn Python
b. Make myself available for Python programming. None of them are
professional Python programmers, so I should be able to hold my own.
c. Experience the difference between Python and J software from the
vantage point of being an effective programmer of both.
d. Give them the benefit of my wisdom. Show them just how easy J is to
write. My hope would be that one or two young engineers would get the idea.
But, as you can probably tell, I'm being cautious about how well this will
turn out.
One final point. Don suggests showing different approaches in J. One of the
boasts of Python is 'There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
way to do it', and many engineers would like life to be like that, so that
they can quickly get on and do it.
Regards
Graham
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