I can understand the appeal of the WYSIWYG aspect of the old form editor, but I much prefer the current system for designing and building forms. I spend much less time aligning controls perfectly and the form resizing behaviour is much better.
As for the cross-platform experience, there is no contest - the current WD implementation is far superior in terms of functionality, reliability and appearance. I'm sure that the state of flux of GUI development from J6.02 to J8 didn't help foster a plethora of GUI apps, but I think the paucity of GUI apps is primarily due to the focus of the majority of users than the facilities of the language. The GUI's I've developed are far from complex, but I've found them relatively easy and satisfying to build, and compare favourably with those of most other languages for GUI-based tasks on Rosetta code. On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 6:17 PM, Björn Helgason <[email protected]> wrote: > J used to be great at making guis and had the best form editor on the > market. > After the fom editor was dropped we have been struggling. > I would love to have easier ways to create guis. > > On 9 Jan 2018 18:57, "Dabrowski, Andrew John" <[email protected]> > wrote: > > So it seems that J is not a self-contained language for making GUIs: you > also need to know either html and js or qt. Clojure has the significant > advantage that the GUI code is in idiomatic Clojure. > > All I said was that J isn't a _good_ language for creating GUIs when > compared with Clojure, Python, or Java for example. I would have thought > that would be uncontroversial: in fact there are very few examples of GUIs > in the repo, and none are elaborate. Evidently no one in the J community > places a very high value on GUIs. > > Which is fine, not every language needs to be great at facilitating the > construction of GUIs, there's a place for scripting languages. I'm happy > to grant J the distinction of being a superb calculation and scripting > language, but for GUIs it happens to be mediocre. > > On 01/09/2018 03:02 AM, Björn Helgason wrote: > > JHS is using HTML as a front end. > There are numerous ways of interacting with HTML tools. > You can see examples and demos doing gui/graphics etc and mixing with > javascripts. > It may be difficult to distinguish between what is J/Javascript. > > On 8 Jan 2018 22:13, "Dabrowski, Andrew John" <[email protected] > ><mailto: > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > After reading "Algebra as Language" and "Computers and Mathematical > Notation", I'm starting to see J the perfect language for numerical > computation. But for general purpose programming I can see Dijkstra's > point. > > When APL was designed computers were seen largely as calculating > machines. But by the 1970s GUIs were starting to be developed, and > computers were being applied in areas where tensors were no longer adequate > as the sole data structure. One thing general purpose programming > languages must have is extensibility, and that J lacks. > > I'm trying to work out what the appropriate use cases are for J, and I > think it's calculating with tensors. If you need more than tensors, or if > you need more than calculation (e.g. GUIs), J is not a good choice. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
