[Jchat] More APL (was: No More APL)

I have no doubt that J is growing faster in terms of numbers of users who "take a look at it" and enjoy playing with it. It's free and the training materials are excellent. The discussion forum is much livelier than ours, though PART of that may be because our users are busy making money and don't necessarily want to (or have time to) talk about how they do it ;-) I can only easily measure our revenues, which have tripled since 2005, while the number of employees has gone from about 5 to about 15 (maintaining reasonable profitability). Our existing customers are generally buying more licenses and we have some new customers as well (sadly mostly through gaining APL marketshare at the moment) - but we're only just getting into some real marketing again... I salute the army of enthusiastic volunteers who have produce a wonderful language and lots of excellent training materials (we're trying to catch up and will have a new book and substantial on line tutorials by the end of this year - and we now have the revenue to invest more in this, which is nice). However: And this is something that I think the J community should rethink (and then DO something about if it really cares): Unless its users find a way to start paying substantial amounts of money to jsoftware so that this company can hire some apprentices and start growing, I really don't see how it can survive in the long term. The "open software" model is a beautiful idea, but I don't personally think that it can work for a tool which is most valuable to "domain experts" - people who will pick it because it means they can solve problems using a computer without learning "software engineering". The kind of people who can develop a J interpreter are not the people who get the biggest benefit from using one, except for a very small group of exceptionally talented people who we all know by name. "open source" works fine for the educational materials and tools that ACCOMPANY a J or APL interpreter, because here the overlap between users/contributors is significant. But NOT for the core product. There have been many free APL systems over the years but not a single one of them ever gained any significant following. In terms of pricing, it may be true that there have been companies that rejected APL due to run time pricing being too high, but as far as I know it hasn't happened to us. The price can obviously be set too high but we try to be sure that we're creating a win/win situation for our customers and building a partnership - we are flexible about the basis upon which runtime fees are computed and do not want to jeopardize the business of our customers. But we do insist that they make a decent contribution to the ongoing development of the technology, if they are making money by using it. If YOU want to give YOUR software away, sign up for a 2% royalty license and pay us 2% of your revenues - no problem! My experience is that FAR MORE BUSINESS IS LOST by APL and J folks because the price is TOO LOW - they just don't get taken seriously. In fact, this is possibly the biggest threat to the technology, as it is dominated by "geeks" who write software for pleasure and are embarrassed to ask for money. I'm still a geek too - but only on every other day. Because I have come to realize that "commercial folks" are SCARED TO DEATH of people who don't ask for money for the work that they do, because (in their eyes) one of the following "must be true": 1) The software is free because it is no good 2) The people who wrote this did it for fun and who knows when they will decide that something else is more fun 3) The people who wrote this simply have no idea what they are doing or where they want to go 4) All of the above It is our DUTY to ask for money so that commercial customers understand the value and feel comfortable that we are driven by motives that they understand. They want someone to blame when it is not working. And we in turn are then honor bound to use that money to safeguard the investment that our customers are making. Putting all the money in your pocket without reinvesting (most) of it is dishonest, but allowing a technology to wither by not ensuring that it has a solid foundation is every bit as irresponsible (IMHO !!!). The first thing we did when we took the reins at Dyalog in 2005 was to significantly increase the amount of money that many of our major customers paid us (essentially by ensuring that they were all paying us according to a consistent, published price list). We were very open about his, explaining our plans for growing the business and more than doubling the size of the development team. The reception was (mostly) enthusiastic - companies who were in the middle of planning an exit strategy because "APL obviously wasn't going to survive in the long term" started hiring new APL developers - our "price increase" was actually going to save them a ton of money (they could cancel "Plan B" which was going to be very expensive and had a high probability of failure). We removed the free run time license under Windows - but we also introduced (almost) free non-commercial licenses and royalty agreements, allowing entrepreneurs to get started with no risk or upfront payments. There were some moans about this, but mostly from people who were concerned that we were committing suicide - not from people to whom it made any monetary difference. And these concerns have been proved to be unfounded. As far as I am concerned, a customer who rejects APL on the basis of price is not likely to ever turn into a significant customer anyway, because either he isn’t focusing on what he is good at, or the benefit that APL provides is marginal. And I do mean "he", generally speaking "she" will be a bit more level-headed about these things ;-). APL and J are valuable tools that will give you a HUGE productivity boost. If you don't understands they are worth enough to you to let us (or jsoftware) have a couple of percent of the income that derives from them (J having given you the mythical 1000% productivity boost), they aren't giving you enough and you should probably use something else. It should be very inexpensive to get started - but people HAVE to contribute when they get real value from using the tool. Morten -----Original Message----- From: Björn Helgason [mailto:gosinn at gmail.com] Sent: 27. maj 2009 10:54 To: Chat forum Subject: Re: [Jchat] No More APL There are several indications that J is growing. The number of all kinds of texts about J in books and web pages seem to be growing a lot. The messages in the Forums seem to be growing. There is a major difference in the possibility to grow J compared to earlier APL and most current APLs as well. J is free and you can also distribute J for free. Most APLs you need to pay for your own copy and you also need to pay if you create an application and want to give it to others. At least it used to be that way and I know of major applications that failed because the APL vendor wanted too much money for the runtime APL to go together with the application. We have no idea of how many J applications there are because they are so easy to distribute. Another obstacle for APL was/is the need for special font and j does not have that obstacle at all. There are people saying that APL is stil growing and it certainly is alive and well after all these years but I am pretty sure that J is growing faster.