== Report of Meeting 2023-10-26 == Present: Art Anger, 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_2023-10-26 1) Ed gave an update on the work he had been doing on GitHub searches. GitHub had been glitching recently and Ed said that this is an example of issues that can occur for the user if the database is not stored locally on their machines. Bob relayed a question that Chris had about crawling the wiki site. Bob understood that the the wiki was being crawled by Ed to build an SQLite database that is then downloaded to users. Ed said that that is mostly correct except that his crawl also includes GitHub and the forums. The Forums and the Wiki are crawled incrementally, while GitHub is crawled in its entirety because there is not a way of tracking incremental changes that Ed is aware of. Ed very much appreciates Chris' offer, but the consensus between Raul and Ed is that it would be extra work to save seconds a week. Having the user hit the MySQL database that Chris creates on the wiki introduces latency that does not occur with a downloaded SQLite database. SQLite also provides relevance ranking across the wiki, forums and GitHub. 2) Ed showed off his adjustments to the GitHub search which now searches the Jsoftware account and provides primitive glyph searching along with the line numbers of the places that the code occurs. Ed has also implemented a 'next character' view that tells the user what characters follow the code fragment that has been searched in decreasing frequency. The challenge is that J primitives are often more than one character. This provides a way to see common use patterns in code. Ed noted that the Fold conjunctions are not used in the J repository (not surprising because of its relatively recent reduction). Ed finds that this a really good way to find examples of how code is used and by exploring the common usage there is an educational advantage. 3) Bob suggested the glyphs might be entered in the same way that tryAPL does, with primitives entered in a complete form rather than character by character. https://tryapl.org/# Raul wondered if there was a way to alert the user that they had completed a glyph with colour coding of the text. The results are refined progressively as characters are added to the text input. The search is very fast and is using indexed search on a string of all of the code. A word formation version on the same string is possible. Raul pointed out that spaces are not always recognized and this is an issue for tokens such as ':' which are suffixes as well as standalone. Bob thought that it might be useful to see the text box separate glyphs by spaces. There seems to currently be an issue with whitespace having meaning. Raul pointed out that quoted strings and comments may require a different approach. 4) Bob thought that there is an opportunity to use this as a platform for labs. Raul and Ed felt that this is better considered as an exploration mechanism for intermediate users because the amount of work to create the labs would be substantial. Bob wondered if a form of annotation might be useful, but Ed pointed out that is more about the commenting of code rather than developing an educational platform. Bob suggested that a wiki page may be able to provide an easier access to the tool. Ed suggested that as much as possible he would like the user to know how to use the tool by the way the tool is built. 5) Raul pointed out that when he has fullscreen and does not have a close button. Ed was checking versions to correct this and will look into that to see that he is doing that properly. Another option is to include a close button on the JQt form. 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 November 2, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
