Source/Eric Iverson's 2 cents
My 2 cents:
The J community would best be served by building J binaries for new platforms, making sure those binaries work properly (rigorous tests), and encouraging the use of J on these new platforms by making the binaries freely and easily available in nice installer packages.
Use the source to take J where it has never gone before. Building alternate versions for systems already well supported by standard Jsoftware installers makes no sense.
Avoid fragmenting our small community by making language changes that have not been discussed in great detail in the programming forum and achieved a high degree of consensus. Play by yourself in private by all means, but a cascade of language changes, regardless of whether good or not, is a disservice to our community.
The goal is new J users who share a common language, not lots of ports and porters.
A great new toy. Play smart.
Originally posted to the Jsource Forum on 2011-03-07 by Eric Iverson.