I'm forever scratching my head over this problem. So hard it bleeds. Can I suggest that whatever's proposed in the way of roadmapping is carried through to completion? There's far too many unfinished toys. (ok... mea culpa...)
IMO The j wiki is one of the jewels of the web: a garden of delights. But it's a hall of mirrors. There's a whole funfair in there. Too often I solve a problem to my satisfaction, then discover all I've done is enable myself to find -- and comprehend -- what's already there. When, a decade ago, it was my karma to have to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base on a regular basis, a young student told me he never bothered with the "helpful" kluge M$ had built on top of it: he used Google and always found what he wanted in no time. Recalling his advice, I've recently taken to googling the J wiki like this: site:jsoftware.com/jwiki <keyword> ...it never fails. Better than the wiki's own searchbox. I don't know why that should be. And you can usefully search on a <keyword> like noun or verb -- a silly thing to do on the web at large. On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > The JSoftware site has a tremendous amount of useful information on it, > probably more than most programming language sites. However, it is just > incredibly difficult to find information that one needs relevant to a > specific issue. > > The "Getting Started" set of articles on the JSoftware site is a good way > to introduce a newbie to the language, but most newbies won't want to plow > through the complete set of docs suggested on those pages. A typical > programmer will read some of the overview docs, and then start searching > for topics relevant to a specific problem they want to solve. That's when > they get into trouble. > > There are several reasons for this. A major problem is the semantics that J > uses. J semantics (eg. noun, verb, rank, hook, fork) are markedly different > than other programming languages. So when a newbie searches for typical > programming issues (function, subroutine, class, etc.) he is met with an > uncomprehending "blank stare" from the Wiki, as the search returns minimal, > mostly confusing, results. > > Also, It is the nature of the Wiki mechanism that there is no strong, > central organizing scheme. The J Wiki has contributions from many authors, > who often have different ideas on how their submissions are titled and > categorized. This means that articles on similar topics can be in > completely different sections, with very different titles. A good example > of this is if you type in "FAQ" in the search box, the first article tells > you how to create a FAQ in the Wiki. > > I posted this to start a discussion on how we can improve this issue. I > have some ideas, which I will present in another post. I have a meeting to > attend now. > > -- > Skip Cave > Cave Consulting LLC > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
