I don't like this law. :)
It's not a problem that I have to build a broad consensus before making a
change to the language,
but (respectfully) it's kind of a problem that *you* don't.
I mean, if any of us wanted to put in the effort, we could fork J and make
our own versions that work however we want.
Back when J went open source, Eric pretty much explicitly asked us not to
do this.
Honestly, I could not be happier that you took it upon yourself to
implement {{ .. }}
and I'm sure whatever you have planned for name:: is going to be cool and
useful, too.
I guess my problem is that these changes seem to be appearing out of the
blue
*without* any formal process from the community.
There should be a real system in place by which these decisions get made.
If you look at python or java, they have the idea of enhancement proposals
that go through a lengthy discussion
and yes, consensus-building process,with people submitting comments and
potential implementations, etc.
And then there's some formal decision making process at the end.
For python, used to be the case that Guido van Rossum ("Benevolent Dictator
for Life") had the
final say, and he almost blew up the python community when he made the
final decision on
assignment-as-an-expression, and last I heard had kind of at least
temporarily gone into "exile"... (??)
If you or Eric are to be the final decision maker, that's a completely fine
way of doing things,
but there should still be a process.
Like... A written out, formal process, with an explicit statement of how
the ideation, consensus building,
and decision making processes are meant to happen... And above all, these
must all be something
more than "whoever-it-is-just-uses-their-best-judgement".
It is obvious that you have good judgement. That's not the question...
This is about the day in the future when the J community is 10 or 100 or
1000
times bigger than it is today.
I know nobody thinks that is going to ever happen, but sometimes that's how
the internet works.
When I learned python, python was pretty much exactly where J is now: a
wacky fringe language
that only a tiny group of people used:
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html (Paul Graham on why you should hire
python programmers in 2004
even though basically 0 companies in the world use python. Note that he
also mentions J in the same category.)
Anyway, sorry if I'm ranting here.
This is the kind of problem that every open source project faces as they
start to approach
the bend in the hockey stick of growth.
I don't know how far in the future that bend is, or if it'll ever happen,
but we should think through the
possibility and try to make our development process robust enough to handle
whatever growth comes our way.
On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 11:44 AM Henry Rich <henryhr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Possession is nine points of the law. :)
>
> I have big plans for name:: . More important, I am opposed to
> assignment in tacits because they destroy the functional-programming
> purity of the tacit language. You will need to build a broad consensus
> before making such a change.
>
> Henry Rich
>
>
>
> On 9/14/2021 10:39 AM, Michal Wallace wrote:
> > what's up with this new `name::` syntax?
> >
> > I have no problem with the concept, but I have a different suggestion for
> > what `name::` should mean: a verb that assigns the variable with that
> name.
> >
> > That seems like a much more commonly wished-for thing (assignment in
> > trains) :
> >
> >
> https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/Interpreter/Requests#Support_assignment_in_tacit_expressions
> >
> > Could you use `name:.` instead for self-effacing names? It's even got a
> > mnemonic... The big colon followed by the diminutive period could
> indicate
> > the change in status.... :)
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
>
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