== Report of Meeting 2023-09-14 == Present: Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault
Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the its wiki page. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2023-09-14 1) Ed now has 7 beta users on the J Wiki Viewer. The current bugs are that Bob has had a small issue with the update app button and Bill Szuch has had a problem with his Windows operating session where it takes J down with interaction. Bob and Raul have noticed that there are some mouse actions that will leak through when the mouse is outside of the application window and hovers over the J wiki viewer. Ed feels that there will be no more features to be added and so is looking forward to the beta cycle. Bob said he could also approach others that had been suggested before and will send personal invitations once Ed had okayed the copy. Ed is still looking for beta testers and can be reached at edward DOT j DOT gottsman AT gmail DOT com . If you are interested, you can contact him and he will relay the details for you to run the viewer. 2) There was a brief discussion about involving the J Playground and the Primer and possibly putting them together to provide a good online resource for newcomers. It would have to be a "lighter" version of the Primer that might not have some of the GUI or Data Processing sessions. Raul mentioned that it would be nice to be able to save state and be able to come back to specific points to the Primer/lab. Bob wondered whether there would be ways to at least keep the verbs and nouns that had been created. Bob also mentioned that he would like to simplify the URL of the J Playground a bit in place of https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html2/ A permanent (hopefully shorter) URL would allow us to start including links of examples within NuVoc. Ed asked if the J Playground had a way to save state. Bob mentioned that you can save the script into the URL and then when it is loaded the contents from the URL are put into the edit window. Raul mentioned a tiny URL that he formed as an example https://tinyurl.com/rotatingF that incorporates shaders, javascript and two lines of J. 3) Raul mentioned that there could be a lot of areas that we could expand into such as structural analysis. It would be interesting to see if it could be accepted as a general purpose language. Raul mentioned Cliff Reiter and Henry Rich as two who were involved with education. Bob mentioned Tom Allen as someone who has been doing a lot of work on advanced physics within the wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Tom_Allen . Bob asked whether there were opportunities to explore certain disciplines as content for the wiki. Raul felt that labs were better used for this purpose. The wiki might be better used as an educational tool. Ed mentioned that the challenges with going into specific disciplines is that there are already existing libraries of tools that may be further advanced. Raul wondered if there were an opportunity to use J as a more flexible tool that may allow you to approach novel problems. Ed felt that there may be a way to use J to teach about how to think about problems. Ed wondered about how J might have been used with Jupyter workbooks (editor's note: Tom McGuire has done some work in this area https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Tom_McGuire/JJupyterNotebooks). 3) Bob wondered about topics that should go into the Developer Category for the wiki. Raul felt that areas of interest like structural analysis would be good examples in specific topics that would bring in good people who would further explore and develop using J. Ed wondered what would make somebody reach for J rather than Python or Swift. One challenge is the language knowledge itself, but a second is that it is more difficult to create artifacts with J than it is with other languages because some of the infrastructure available. Ed mentioned Norman Drinkwater's page on developing a stand alone https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Guides/J9_Standalone application and Ed still finds that difficult. Raul felt that except for the DLL's everything could be a single file comprising of the text files. There may be issues with unpacking zip files and security. Ed felt that the web becomes a more attractive distribution method. Raul pointed out that one of J's advantages is that it can be used across multiple platforms. Ed thought that the browser was a friendlier multi-platform. Raul brought up JHS which is the browser version of J https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Guides/JHS . Ed felt that if he could develop with J the way that he does with JavaScript he would be happy. Where he could have J tags with the same power of JavaScript tags with controlling the DOM. Ed's question is whether there is debugging support in J for the J Playground. Ed says it may be a documentation issue with more explanation being provided in the wiki. Ed would like J to be a first class browsing language. For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is September 21st, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
