BobGraf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 4. If you care to learn about the acceptance of APL in the world at large, > and by extension of J language, one of many websites you could look at is > http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm > You will discover that APL ranks 44 out of 50 with a use(?) rating of 0.117% > or one out of about 855. (I think it's reasonable to assume that J - which > didn't make the list - would rank lower yet.) You may find this rank to be > acceptable or even irrelevant, I do not. It disturbs me. This page says "The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors". Digging a bit deeper, it seems that the ratings are calculated by counting hits in the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is +"<language> programming" Now, very many users of APL don't see themselves as "programmers" (if you asked them what they do for a living, many of them would tell you they are financial analysts, actuaries or chemical engineers). Most usage of APL happens outside what you would normally call the "programming community". In our (Dyalog) user community, the large customers tend to recruit new people based on domain knowledge and spend 3-6 weeks teaching them APL, and then another year or two learning about the product which is being built upon APL. This makes much more sense than looking for a "generic APL programmer" and then trying to teach them (say) chemical engineering. There IS also a "professional APL programming community", who tend to serve the domain experts, helping them wrap applications in secure/robust, scalable architectures - but these people constitute a small fraction of the people using APL. So, although I AM working to move APL higher up on the list, I think it is fairly safe to say that a search for the phrase "APL programming" will significantly under-represent the actual use of APL out there. Probably even more so for J. Hopefully the following number will make you feel slightly less disturbed: The value of products and services which have APL as the primary base technology easily exceeds a billion US dollars a year (just a quick +/ of customers I have knowledge of). Morten ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
