I have just got the July issue of Computer (computer.org/computer) and was startled to read an article "In Praise of Scripting" which entirely ignored APL/J while praising the benefits of its style as seen in various other coding schemes.
I think the article can be loaded down through http://csdl.computer.org/dl/mags/co/2008/07/mco2008070022.pdf without payment. This seems to me to be a good opportunity for getting the APL/J world some long overdue attention, either by a letter to the editor or (much better) through a formal article following on from the above giving some APL history, some description of APL/J features comparing them to those praised in the above, and some examples of serious use of APL/J. Curiously, I exchanged some emails with Guido van Rossum, the Belgian originator of Python (which was praised in the Computer article), quite a few years ago now, and got him eventually to agree that there was a lot of similarity between J and Python, though he insisted that he hadn't known about APL or J when he was developing Python. I don't feel competent (being thoroughly retired and out-of-date) or appropriate (being on the editorial board of Computer and being notorious for bringing APL/J up in conversations there) to do this, but I would be happy to help and advise as necessary anybody volunteering to do this. A quick effort could maybe get published before the end of the year if it is gone about in the right way. Neville Holmes, P.O. Box 2412, Bakery Hill 3354, Victoria Find a better answer, faster with the new Yahoo!7 Search. www.yahoo7.com.au/search ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
