Dan, thanks for making the point so well. I've been trying to point out that
many opportunities exist for some big productivity improvements when it comes
to the J IDE.
For me, its all about personal (human) productivity (the interpreter is already
productive enough). The goal is to provide anything that gets the job done
faster (as judged by how much time I need to provide). If we want to
understand why some J users may be put off, you have to look at what they feel
are obstacles in getting their job done(i.e.where does their time go in
building an application from cradle to grave). It should not be misunderstood
as a put down to the incredible job that has been done by the entire J team in
getting us to the point we are at today.
At present, I find I have to remember a lot of names, do a lot of typing, and
organize structures in my head about how J objects are laid out in memory
(locales) and on disk (script files). All of this translates to complexity
and time. Anything that minimizes this load on me (and other J users) by an
intelligently designed IDE (not that the current IDE is not already pretty
good) goes a long way towards making J more usable and productive. But, I
understand it's going to take time and dedication by the J team and the J user
community to help in this endeavour.
/Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Dan Bron
Sent: Fri 26/01/2007 9:18 PM
To: 'General forum'
Cc:
Subject: RE: [Jgeneral] Lack of software abstractions
Chris wrote:
> You could indeed save your work as big blobs of text in 5!:5
> format
I think I understand his point now, and I think you may have
misunderstood it.
Have you ever used the Dyalog IDE? It's breathtaking. Gorgeous.
Sublime.
I think what Joe (and many of the rest of us!) want is something akin
to that, and he does not care about how it actually stores
code. Imagine a J IDE similar to Dyalog's, but which writes functions
to script files. Not as big, ugly blobs, but in properly
formatted, nicely laid-out script files.
The scripts would not be any different than they are now. In
particular, they could be edited by any editor, shared via email,
cut, copied, pasted, rearranged, reloaded, etc. A J script edited by
Magic J IDE v2.0 would be indistinguishable from one edited
in notepad, or in the current J IDE.
The difference would be in the IDE. For example, if I typed a function
name into the session, and double clicked it, or put my
cursor over it and pressed SHIFT+Enter, a small window could pop up
with the function's definition, which I could edit. Then I'd
press Esc and the new definition would be loaded into the session and
simultaneously written (nicely) into the proper place in a
script file.
Alternatively, Shift+Enter could do some of the magic that CTRL+F1 and
edit_z_ do: find the script which defined the cursor'd
name, open it in a new script window, and put the cursor on the first
line of its definition. Then I could edit-edit-edit, CTRL+W
(or some version of CTRL+W which puts focus back in the session window,
like F12 does), and merrrily go on my way with the new
version of the name.
(This latter isn't always the right thing to do: Shift+Enter implies
that only the new definition of the current name should be
loaded, not the entire script which defined it, which could have side
effects.)
There are some edge conditions: What if the current name wasn't loaded
from a script? What if it were typed directly in the
session window? One (very nice!) thing that could be done is to
inspect the input log, extract all the lines that (could've)
contributed to the creation of the name, pull them out in order, and
put them in a temp script, ready to be edited and loaded.
Just because J is script-based doesn't mean the IDE can't automate some
common tasks. It can just be an advanced tool to work
with scripts.
-Dan
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