As Steve Yegge has <https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX> pointed out <https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/bambi-meets-godzilla>, accessibility and marketing are what separate ideas that survive from ones that pass into obscurity.
One thing I think J could be doing better is making the standard libraries easier to discover. Example: The 4th puzzle on Advent of Code <http://adventofcode.com/> requires generating MD5 hashes of a string. I've been using J for several months, but the first thing I found when looking for MD5 was this page <http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Pascal_Jasmin/SHA_1(2c20)2_and_MD5_for_windows>. It wasn't until much later that I discovered I already possessed on my computer a J addon with this functionality, in the form of *addons/convert/misc/md5.ijs*! This is an accessibility problem. In my ideal world, the top result for googling the phrase "J md5" would be a page from jsoftware.com containing documentation for the above addon, with pretty formatting, syntax highlighting, example uses, and links to related addons. My realistic expectation is that typing queries such as "md5" or "ssl" into the search bar on jsoftware.com (or the code.jsoftware.com wiki) would at minimum return links to addons containing those words. Currently, the closest hit (other than wiki user Pascal Jasmin's page) is the j802 release notes page <http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/ReleaseNotes/J802>, which mentions cryptographic functions exist, but provides no link to further documentation. If the J scripts library is supposed to be like the .NET Framework or CPAN, it needs to be more discoverable. Indexing addons for keywords would go a long way toward this, I think. I'm posting this complaint because J is my preferred language, and it makes me sad to see it losing mindshare to products like Matlab. Sincerely, Alex ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
