Greetings edu-siggers! Way back in the archives you'll find me extolling a language known as J, by Kenneth Iverson, his son Eric, and Roger Hui. I never met any of these guys in person, but knew of Iverson through APL, which I discovered at Princeton, and fell in love with. Iverson helped me squish some typos in my Jiving with J.[1]
What I admire about J, as about R and Python via Numpy, is the inclusion of an n-Dimensional Block (array, addressable memory with multiple axes), as a language native, a core star. J reads like a right-to-left pipeline with an nD Block going through it. I guess we'd need to call that a Functional Programming language right? As the former high school math teacher (long ago -- though I'm still in the schools, as recently as today in fact, as an after school Python instructor), I still chafe at the fact that we don't dive in with these tools at that age level, except in rare cases, and instead insist on students buying all those TIs year after year. But that's me the broken record. For those schools that break out, charter or public (nevermind, how they talk in the US makes noooo sense), there's a world of wonderful technology to explore, while learning the math that matters. y = mx + b. Turn m over for w, and b is for bias.[2] Kirby [1] http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/Jlang.html [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=mcdonalds+upside+down+w&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch (recent meme)
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig