User:Martin Neitzel
Martin Neitzel
Email: neitzel@marshlabs.gaertner.de
I tweak my mail servers to accept little more than text/plain messages. To avoid waisting any efforts and receiving a bounce, you are kindly asked to review this list of strictly enforced restrictions on emails to me:
http://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/mail-policy.html
In addition, there is also a list of commonly well-known Netiquette-like preferences:
http://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/email-to-mn.html
Quick Bio
Born in 1963, Comp.Sci. Master's degree equivalent 1990 (at Techn. University Braunschweig (FRG) with the focus on programming languages and software development), research assistant 1990-95.
Founded Gaertner Datensysteme with three partners in 1993, now 13 people. The company specializes on Unix systems, network administration, Internet access and service provisioning, and related application development in these areas. (The company also actively provides J education and application development support.)
Involvement with J
Two years of exposure to APL in the mid-eighties were among the best things which happened to me during my Comp. Sci. education. Nevertheless I mostly stopped using APL because I had picked up Unix around 1984 and would not go back to the closed world of APL. In my opinion, its character set simply hinders communication about the code and non-APL tool integration too much.
When APL's ASCII dialect J was released in 1990/1991 (even with public domain interpreter source included), I was immediately interested in the language because it allowed array programming in the Unix environment.
Later on, the Iverson Inc. team was so kind to let me participate a bit in the J development. Several times I enjoyed being their guest in Toronto, and from 1995 to 2000 I assisted them with the J/Unix ports and releases. My biggest impact on J was probably around 1995/6 when I argued that the rank of classic "scalar functions" such as *: (Square) should be switched from _ to 0 (which happened with J Release 3.05).
My foremost J interests remain the portability of J (both of the system and of your code) across platforms. In addition, the historical evolution of the language is a pet peeve of mine.