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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm