British J Association?

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 12

When are you going to change your name to British J Association? We subscribed to Vector to receive APL information. How can you assume APL’ers are going to learn a new language? APL symbols may be Greek, but they are largely intuitive, whereas what is intuitive about @#%"&:? J is a concession to ASCII and as someone said is so much ‘comic book invective’.

It would be interesting to find out if corporations are switching from APL and other languages to J. It seems to us that J is the province of academics and theoreticals. R. G. Brown asks why isn’t APL used more widely. If APL scares people because of its symbols, what do you think J is doing?

We note that IBM has not endorsed J, nor the learned physicist, Gérard Langlet. If the bulk of Vector is going to be on J, do not renew our subscription.

Don Mattern