Hi, (I am using Linux as my platform of choice...)
This /may/ sound harsh and full of dark critism. This is only due to the fact, that I am no native speaker. My abbility to express a wide variaty of moods is still very limited. I am very new to J. I am not new to computer programming, computer languages and such... Would it be a reasonable assumption to say, that most newcomers to J are haveing programming experience to a certain extend...or in other words, people starting computer programming with just J are more seldom... And would it be further valid to assume, that the first steps into a new programming language are based on "hello world" :) and "playing around and trying some cool tricks" (Asking: What concept makes this language special and different?) A last assumption: Experience programmers may have more fun by following more dense written tutorials than those tutorial starting by explaining how to use J as a calculator at the REPL and will skip those more likely. My preffered way of learning J to the point, where I will be able to do my own experiments with it, "predict", what I would expect as a result and finally find the bugs I did myself by reading online resources (again the dense ones and not the "hello world" ones), would be to read sources like the NuVoc and https://sergeyqz.github.io/jcheatsheet/ And I think, a "problem" (no native speaker, sorry) of these sources is, that they are explaining J in and with J terms. Example: Match _ x -: y _ 1 if entire nouns are the same in shape and elements (but not necessarily type), 0 otherwise (from the cheatsheet) How much additional clicks do I need to understand, what the explanation of "-:" tries to explain me? Match (any rank of) x -: (any rank of) y if x and y are of the exact dimensions, -: returns 1 else 0. The type of data doesn't matter. (and I am not sure, if this is even correct...I would need some research to check this...) It may be even useful to commit some "white lies" (as D.Knuth in "The TeXbook" did) to explain things "more shallow" and not in the complete exhausting depth at first to get people (succesfully) experimenting with J. And if they are hooked, start telling them the "real truth" :) And: The most preferrable solution to my grumbling would be a link to a source, which does all this already and I had simply missed that one. No harm meant! ... only my two mico cents... You currency may vary... :) Cheers! Meino ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
