Someone recently linked to Ron Jeffery's blog re throwing in the towel on learning J. I developed a respect for Ron back when I hung out on Ward Cunningham's original Wiki. Ward once raved about J, even though he thought he had fully "grok"ed it in a weekend or so.
> On Feb 15, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Vijay Lulla <vijaylu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I came across > http://waterstreetgm.org/throwing-in-the-towel-on-becomming-a-programmer/this > on HN. And > http://sdawncasey.wordpress.com/about/ in that page. Maybe these pages > might be useful to consider how newcomers take to concepts. These pages are > fascinating to me because it shows that even though these people have had > prior experience with other languages they claim that they still don't > understand programming. IMO, the emphasis on concepts and how J/APL can aid > in these explorations is the best approach to teach programming. Actually > Ken Iverson's explanation of Under (&.) [I read this on Ken Iverson's > Quotations page] is one of the best explanations of a very commonly > occurring programming idiom. > > > On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 12:51 PM, robert therriault > <bobtherria...@mac.com>wrote: > >> Hi Henry and Raul, >> >> I think that the audience being young programmers is a good start towards >> the issues that Raul raises. As an additional challenge, I think that we >> would want to use an example that is user friendly once their interest has >> been attracted. There are some areas of J that have more overhanging >> learning curves than others :) I don't think we would want to get them >> interested and then send them into the teeth of image processing unless we >> also provided a good road map. >> >> Cheers, bob >> >>> On Feb 15, 2014, at 9:36 AM, Henry Rich <henryhr...@nc.rr.com> wrote: >>> >>> My idea about that is, we need to appeal to young programmers. The more >> experience people have with scalar languages, the less able they are to >> learn J. The more experience they have with other languages in a class >> with J, the less they need to learn J. >>> >>> The application needs to be of obvious interest to a non-mathematical, >> non-financial user. My target would be a scientist/engineer/IT person who >> has a computation to perform and no canned package to do it, so they have >> to write a little code. >>> >>> Henry Rich >>> >>>> On 2/15/2014 12:30 PM, Raul Miller wrote: >>>> Perhaps it is also worth noting that we are not going to impress >> everyone, >>>> nor should we want to. >>>> >>>> J currently caters to some high powered wallstreet types, high quality >>>> engineering types and so on. But it's hardly the only language in use >> for >>>> any of those categories. >>>> >>>> ... anyways we should probably think a bit about qualities of the sort >> of >>>> people we think we want to attract with this video (or videos, since we >>>> might want to attract different kinds of people). >>>> >>>> I'd also be tempted to enlist Cathrine Lathwell's advice on video >> creation >>>> - she has more than a little relevant experience. >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
