I don't know where to start on this one. > Isolation, schmisolation. APL's (and J's) claim to fame is a > program written in one line. If you need "isolation",
The new Grid is meant to uphold this very claim grid <your favorite expression> You could have your 100% compatible rusty old grid, but you wouldn't have the one-liners. Before you start grasping (returning the bluntness) the idea of modular isolation in software design, you need to make a distinction between syntactic code style of a language as one layer, where one-liners live, and the component architecture of the system design as the other, where the UI lives. And last quote of Dick Bowman, where he also says "J, to me, is plain ugly"... why not also recall that the previous change was from a DOS UI. Wouldn't it be nice to be compatible with that. ----- Original Message ---- From: Andrew Nikitin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 12:04:34 AM Subject: [Jprogramming] Grid API Usability To keep on topic: I honestly tried to perform the test you originally requested, but after I found out that mortality rate of my old grid using scripts is 100%, I stopped immediately. Maybe grid is just not for me. >The solution is to protect your application >code from the library implementation, using an isolation layer. Isolation, schmisolation. APL's (and J's) claim to fame is a program written in one line. If you need "isolation", "layer" or any other such words to express your idea, you might be using wrong language. I do not want to use J to write a Fortran program. Do not get me wrong, I can write Fortran program in any language, I just do not want to. The only reason I bother doing GUI in J is when I think I might be using the verbs I've just written some time in the future. And so far when this future comes my gui scripts do not work and I have to dig in and figure out how to start the verbs that do the actual work manually. So as time passes I feel less and less like doing GUI at all -- because of all that negative reinforcement. Grid is, possibly, the biggest offender, but the rest of wd hasn't been awfully stable either. Allow me to conclude with a quotation from a reputable source (internet). Please note mentioned J version. They did not learn anything. x. and y. (and m, n, u, v) I am shocked, shocked. >A problem with J is the way that it changes from release >to release - quite fundamental things which worked in J2 >need reqrites to work in J3 (GUI code is a particularly >painful example). The long-standing excuse has been that >there was no customer base to alienate; current >documentation says that future releases will be >backwards-compatible (frankly, if J does not address this >issue they may never have a customer base to alienate). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
