On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote: > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/j?sort=votes&pagesize=10
Hmm... Most of these questions are several years old. Top question is currently not really about J at all, but about Haskell (asking if some J mechanisms have seen much use in Haskell). And it raises some odd viewpoints. For example: "But note that this style now results in two traversals." -- nwhich is not a concern about a "functional issue" but about a "side effect" issue. I suspect that this is a significant concern because Haskell's architecture favors the use of memory as a randomly structured resource. (See also: https://gist.github.com/2841832 and http://www.futurechips.org/chip-design-for-all/what-every-programmer-should-know-about-the-memory-system.html) Currently, the second question is closed as not productive (and it's still the second ranked question - I wonder if this says something about the validity of the ranking system?) Third question is also at least as much about Haskell as J (asking about the relationship between Haskell's use of the term "monad" and J's). Fourth question is a comparison between APL dialects. The fifth question is the first one that's really about J, and it's basically a person that was looking for # and not knowing how to find it. The sixth one was about doing a large project in J. That one was interesting though perhaps dated (and, I've done my own work with .NET and J, and I must confess that I do not understand enough of the mechanisms to say anything about J7 in that context - but I do remember that dealing with errors post-deployment was painful, because the .NET environment did not give me any details on the errors - I wound up deploying J on a user's desktop and running the code from J's session manager to try and reproduce errors triggered from .NET -- I think they wound up being the consequence of a changed xml structure though that was not evident from the error messages...) The seventh one sounds like it might be related to rot-13 and other caesar cypher mechanisms, but it's really about using '-' to indicate negative numbers for code golf. I like concise code, but code golf exercises usually have, from my point of view, totally arbitrary constraints which takes the fun out of it. The current eighth one also seems, to me, to be too arbitrary to be interesting. (It's about a function that can be thought of as indexing into an array whose first elements look like this: 3 6 12 12 3 24 24 24 3 6 48 48 3 48 48 48 ...) The current ninth one is a general question about coding that uses J as one of several examples. Not sure how I feel about this quesiton And, the current 10th question is another general one about APL dialects. So... most of these questions about J are about J and other languages. We can help some people with these kinds of interests by showing how to make J work in multi-lingual environments, and I think that others just need more and better examples of arbitrary J code. Or, that's my understanding... -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
