Closed source is less of a problem for me than the draconian licensing. Paying such steep costs to use in production is a no go for me. I could afford the $1500 personal productivity tool fee for just myself, but then none of my coworkers can use anything I write which probably doesn't help advertising. I really like the symbols more than J, but J ends up being more practical for me. I think if array langs are to take off, kx systems would have to make their software free and just charge for support, but I doubt they'll do that with how much money they're making.

I still don't get the companies that cannot take the lessons of Smalltalk vendors. It's no accident Borland could sell product and Smalltalk vendors died off with developer and deployment fees.

I still think there is a place for paid tools, but more JetBrain / old Borland then ParcPlace.

Yea. Ain't nobody wanna pay a deployment fee. Visual Studio charges for the IDE as I understand it which you don't even have to use.

> I really worry about their long term survivability.

Me too. It's a relief that GNU APL has become a viable alternative, in case Dyalog goes under.

Do you use GNU APL? I talked to the maintainer once, but not aware of its speed and maturity.

I've only used it enough to see that majority of the code I write in Dyalog APL will run there as well. Perhaps I should start in GNU APL in the first place, but Dyalog's environment is just nicer

Yea, good point. The libraries appear to be fairly good at least (ODBC, DDE, plots, R interface...etc).