Short form: a variant of J would probably be ideal for real time work. Long form:
When I look at the design of APl and J, what I see are a variety of concepts of primitives with fairly understandable costs grafted onto a framework which was designed to neglect costs. And, certainly, both approaches have advantages. Meanwhile, a variety of factors favor us specializing and working with abstractions. But all abstractions leak and all specializations are limited. But, also, now that the internet is international it's exposed to both a bulk of users without any technical understanding but also a collection of abusive users who have deep technical understanding. Which leads into exploits like rowhammer (which use timing, lots of computing time, and physical limitations of memory chips to bypass protections built into the processor). This particular example is difficult to detect because our systems are designed to neglect "real time" issues. Meanwhile, most heavy uses of computer systems involve real time media - audio, video, interactive games, etc. Also, some of the major advances in computing are in areas like GPUs. These have architectures which are vaguely similar to an APL or J architecture, but hardware limitations impose some arbitrary constraints of the sort which are usually glorified by type systems. So... anyways... inertia is probably going to continue to carry us in similar directions. We are creatures of habit and there are a lot of us. But this means that something "J-like but not J" is probably going to matter a lot. In somewhat tangential news, there's some really painful color choices that some of the people working in these areas tend to favor: http://www.cosy.com/ https://colorforth.github.io/ This one isn't too hard on the eyes, though, I guess: http://www.greenarraychips.com/ -------------- Anyways... food for thought... though perhaps not the most digestible food... Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
