On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Henry Rich <henryhr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:

>
> THIS IS NOT TEACHING - it's selling.  Focus on the result, not how it was
> achieved.
>

The challenging part of selling is determining what people are interested
in buying. Once we know that, it's probably not that difficult to craft a
presentation that highlights it.

bob mentioned calculator on steroids.

Related, but broader?, I bought into J as a tool for data analytics, which
seems to be in vogue.

I hear others interested in J for it's ability to solve complex math
problems, which is still related to the calculator on steriods.

I doubt too many get excited about J as a platform for web development,
even though it has those capabilities.  It's not what attracts people to J.

I remember stumbling upon this thread awhile ago:
http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/programming/2011-June/023104.html "One
word description of J"

For a given problem, what differentiates J from other solutions? The first
answer that comes to mind is the conciseness, succinctness, notation close
the problem, etc.. I think that is more along the lines of "why APL?" type
of question instead of why J?

Anyhow, my recommendation would be to tackle a data analytics problem. This
isn't a great video yet it highlights a large selling point of F# 3.0, type
providers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOST3W88-Y

Other examples of using the world bank data:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/accessing-world-bank-data-apis-python-r-ruby-stata

Of course, the examples are pretty straightforward since the library
already exists. It might be interesting to people to build an example that
shows how J does something similar in cases when there isn't a library.

It would show off:

1. Sockets
2. XML or CSV parsing
3. Aggregating / selecting / filtering
4. Plotting

To get fancy, put a JHS front-end on it

I think something like that could probably be typed in 5 minutes. That
feels like it would be powerful -- especially with the JHS front-end that
would allow some user interaction
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