On Wed, 9 Oct 2013, Richard Gaylord wrote:
....
Mathematica), 3 of which use WL to write computer simulation programs for
well-known models used in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and
economics. this enabled scientists in many fields to learn the language in
the best possible way - by seeing it applied to real problems in their own
fields. There are no equivalent resources for learning J, perhaps becuase
few users of J are academicians who have the time to do it.
i would encourage J enthusiasts to develop such resources (e.g. Data
Science is a rapidly emerging field with not only courses, but also degrees
being developed and offered at many universities and and J seems like it
would be well-suited for use in the field)....
I've used J for astrophysical computations for decades (see my web page
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~jph/J_page.html for some examples).
I have yet to find any astronomers who have had any interest in looking
into the language. I think the real problem may be that the J comunity is
really quite small and the fraction of scientists who can see the beauty
of J is likewise small. It's a problem of "critical mass" -- If I tell a
colleague "I have a J program that does that", they may accept the results
but they never try to understand the code. They just ask "Why on earth
would you use a language like that?" There just aren't the academic users
to write "user friendly" resources -- which is a pity.
Patrick
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