Steven Taylor wrote:
Take the APL character idea a little beyond intellisense, and state it
another way it becomes write in APL and render / compile to J.  I'm less
comfortable with that.

I've spent a lot of time nibbling away at the edges of this very problem.
But now you put it like that, I have to confess: I'm less comfortable with
it too. I'm beginning to question my motives, and I can't yet be sure of a
worthy one. (A worthy one might be: J is the better/purer language.)

For me, is it really that J is free, but APL isn't? That J apps port easily
between Win and Mac, but APL doesn't? That J sits lightly on the machine
(and is docile inside a Mac app/bundle), whereas all APLs graft themselves
onto the system like mistletoe? That J source consists of txtfiles, like a
proper IDE should, whereas all APLs have this opaque workspace?

I've put a lot of effort into learning J. A pleasurable activity as time
goes by, if not at the start, like learning Arabic. But it's been these
advantages that have driven my effort.


On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Steven Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:

> "I have never seen any context where code in visual studio can be
> emailed to someone else and "it'll just work"."
>
> It wont.  VS is clunky in this regard.  The VS team is working at resolving
> this on a number of fronts, but they're not there yet.  That reference was
> to J code (it'll just work).
>
> "J is open-sourced now, so it is a "simple matter of programming" now to
> implement this idea for an alternative input method and presentation for
> J."
>
> All features are not present in all IDE's.  Sure.  Jump around.  Everyone
> does.
>
> The subtle, but important point worth talking about is the one Devon points
> out.
>
> Take the APL character idea a little beyond intellisense, and state it
> another way it becomes write in APL and render / compile to J.  I'm less
> comfortable with that.
>
>
> On 9 April 2013 23:27, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Steven Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > I'm curious to see what Greg cooks up.  I am in VS most days, so I'm
> > bound
> > > to check it out.
> > ...
> > > Do the lessons of html, css, js, jsv, json apply here?  It's nice being
> > > able to send an email with some code, and it'll just work.
> >
> > I have never seen any context where code in visual studio can be
> > emailed to someone else and "it'll just work".  Typically, you have to
> > know how to create the right kind of solution and/or project or
> > application and then you have to know how to include the code. You
> > also typically have to know which version of visual studio to use and
> > you may have to have the right components installed. For people that
> > run afoul of these issues, you can usually buy support if you can
> > afford it.
> >
> > I've run into problems getting my own code to work, when it was
> > written with "too old" of a version of visual studio.
> >
> > (This might be an example of "if it's not broke, don't fix it" which
> > is just as valid if we remove the 'not'?)
> >
> > Visual Studio can be a nice code authoring system, but it has its own
> > rules and its community is focussed on paid distribution of compiled
> > binaries.
> >
> > --
> > Raul
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
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