I both agree, and disagree with you, James. I have been an APL fan, and successful user since the late '70's. It didn't take me long at all to learn the character set. APL should have become a favorite, mainstream programming tool. Obviously it did not. One reason as already pointed out is that in its early days, it was ahead of existing hardware, and only worked well only on mainframes - you know what they'd cost in today's dollars!?! It could even cause an older HP "minicomputer" to dim all its lights! With the advent of IBM PC's and all newer machines, APL performed like a champ - so that impedement disappeared. It's greater productivity has always been known.
I sincerely believe that APL, and its successor, J, have both failed in popularity for reasons having nothing to do with technical issues, but rather with issues related to sales and marketing of the APL and J products. In addition, it's hard to compete with C. With the full backing of the old Bell Labs, and the Unix world, that's quite a challenge! But the real reason is not to be found on blaming stuff on others. The late, great Dr. Ken Iverson after leaving academia spent many years with IBM, and, I suspect, was indoctrinated in the IBM ivory tower mentality, which I, as a customer of IBM experienced in other areas altogether, a real turn-off. IBM is principally a hardware manufacturer, and not all that oriented to software sales. Even when a number of IBM'ers left and went into their own businesses of marketing APL, it was sort of like Kevin Costner's "Field of Dreams" - if you build it, they will come! Baloney! Just look at the majority of forum articles. I am a member of all the forums except the Beta one. Many of the messages are oriented towards getting the most bang out of one J sentence, terse, cryptic stuff. Books on APL warned against doing this because it leads to poor readibility, and if you're doing any serious development, you will have problems down the road maintaining this code. Those same articles reference the need of extensive commenting so that the code can be easily understood even by its author even six months later! Most NB.'s I see in these articles are little more than line titles. Before the days of the internet, such programming style was referred to as "cyberporn". I agree that J is not a pretty language to look at, but you can say the same about C. So what? J extends the use of APL without losing its productivity and effectiveness, and that's what's important. I believe that the use of the ASCII character set was a wise choice because of the all the ramifications of connectivity with the outside world. I don't wish to appear to be pessimistic, but to avoid going in the direction of the Sony Betamax, the purveyors of J must address the issue of sales and marketing. Also, they must really come to grips with the GUI - a fact of life in in the worlds of Windows, Mac, and Linux. Without this, J could be releagted to being a sophiscated desk calculator! Programs today are interactive. A real toolkit is needed, and it must be properly documented. The functions are there, but more is needed. The J purveyors should like at professional quality C compilers and provide a similar GUI toolkit with similarly detailed tutorials. I have personal e-mails with some of the key J purveyors, and while very polite and encouraging to me, they seem content with the current status of the J GUI for windows. I respectfully disagree! Most important, however, is for the J purveyors to get out there into the real world and push their outstanding product. It needs, and certainly deserves this kind of effort to make it big time. Without that, it will remain an academic curiosity. And the world will be poorer for it. 'Nuff said, Bob from Boynton Beach, FL -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Readable-J-tp14355283s24193p14397122.html Sent from the J Chat mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
