Thanks for sharing the link to ELI. I read through the Primer last night.
It was a good read and was interesting to see things explained from a
different angle. There are some interesting additions like array indexing
X{1], dictionaries and tables. It feels more approachable to a beginner
since it has fewer concepts or at least they weren't introduced in the
introductory text. For example in in J there's the parts of speech, tacit
vs explicit, locales, FFI, hooks, forks. Even boxing and rank were barely
touched upon. All very powerful yet can become a rabbit hole when learning.
There are other areas in ELI like file io and network communication that
appear to be missing. I also welcome additional perspectives. I"ll probably
keep it around with kona for playing with different concepts.
On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 7:31 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm on tap to give a J talk to a Meetup on 1/21/2014 and second the idea
> for more "fun" J examples. I'm thinking of re-using the "Newton solver"
> example I've used before, but it would be nice to have less mathematical
> examples as well.
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Björn Helgason <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > > From the pages about eli " (J is both free and uses ASCII characters
> but
> > it
> > > is more terse and difficult to learn than APL)."
> > >
> > > I do not share this view but many people do.
> > >
> > > I think it important to get rid of this notion.
> >
> > Maybe? But I think it's a valid notion, for some people (not me!).
> >
> > Personally, I find python and numpy to be much harder to understand
> > and work with than J. Stuff like 1 + 2 3 4 giving the result 3 4 5 is
> > much easier to work with than python's list compehensions and tuples
> > and other such complexities.
> >
> > But my finding J easier to work with does not really matter - in part
> > because python is being used at the freshman level in a lot of
> > colleges. And I think that that came about because the python
> > community has a good sense of humor (the language, after all, was
> > named after a british comedy show). And also, to become proficient
> > with J you have to be comfortable with being ignorant about things you
> > have learned about. (Ignorance being the state of existence where you
> > can learn something as opposed to the more combative form where you
> > know stuff and are thus immune to further education - though that can
> > also be temporarily useful.)
> >
> > That said, we could do with a lot more "fun" J examples. And/or
> > J+Javascript (jhs) examples. Or J+C examples. Etc. Maybe we should
> > have a wiki page describing how to make J save menu options also save
> > to github, or maybe dropbox? Etc...
> >
> > Perhaps we should also create an "art" forum? But perhaps first we
> > should start publishing hobby/art/attractive code related to fun
> > things we can be doing?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --
> > Raul
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Devon McCormick, CFA
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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