Vijay,
Thanks for sharing your observations. I am not a fan of boxes (well I
like and use them all the time but have lost too much time and hair over
the "typography of boxes").
But your use of them to demonstrate concepts in other contexts is a good
one. One of the places that sealed my dislike was exactly that use in "
Blaauw, G.A., F.P. Brooks, Jr./Computer Architecture: Concepts and
Evolution/. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997, 1213 pages." Again, I'm
not saying I disliked the resulting explanations and pictures, but
rather that getting the characters to typeset correctly from the TeX
source document caused considerable angst.
I agree that interactive computing is a lot of fun. Thanks for
additional thoughts on things in J that are likely to appeal to new users.
On 2015/01/09 07:40 , Vijay Lulla wrote:
Devon,
Not only short snippets like the ones you mention, but on projecteuler.net,
but also the distinctive display of information in such posts increased my
curiosity. I distinctly remember the first time I saw some boxed items, I
thought "Nice! this programmer must have some utility/program to generate
such output". But I kept on seeing this so often (in J submissions by
different authors) that I thought that it might be something that J
programmers just do. Regardless, it deserved further examination. And,
boy am I glad that I persisted. Box display is another aspect of J that I
absolutely love. I now use J to create boxed displays for use in my
documents (primarily txt or html) to demonstrate some concepts in other
languages. For e.g. I used { (>:i.3);>:i.3 to demonstrate 2-dimensional
indexing for use in R.
J (and R too) make interactive use so much fun. And this is the primary
reason I like these languages so much.
Thanks,
Vijay.
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Vijay -
Thanks for the sharing your views. It's always good to hear from new
enthusiasts. Those of us who have been doing this for a long time
sometimes feel like we're shouting into the wind, so it's good to feel that
the community's efforts are appreciated.
I especially appreciate your acknowledgement that much of what we do in
other languages and environments constitutes wasting our time on minutiae.
I have to work in other languages because of work - though I do some J here
as well - and feel very keenly the time wasted when I have to code up a
five- or ten-character J solution in ten or twenty lines of code.
I was recently perusing the J contributions on "dailyprogrammer" (e.g.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer/comments/2rfae0/20150105_challenge_196_practical_exercise_ready/
)
from "Godspiral" and, comparing the his few lines of J to others' pages of
C++ or Java, I remain astonished that this disparity doesn't raise more
curiosity about J.
Regards,
Devon
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:04 PM, Vijay Lulla <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I came across the below article by the way of Hacker News.
http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234
I'd like to share a couple of my views about J community. I came across
J
sometime in 2012 by the way of projecteuler.net. As I learned a little
bit
of the J language I realized that I was spending (wasting?) a lot of time
on minutiae in other languages/environments! I kept at it and now J is
my
favorite language and I use it almost daily. There are a couple of
things
very unique about J: the awesome community, and the amount of interesting
material that this community has generated.
I'm also very impressed with the community's interest in always tying
many
lessons/insights to its roots. This is unique, at least IMO to J
(probably
to APL too but I couldn't say since I've not used it). And the more I
read
about people like Ken Iverson, Ian Sharp, and Eugene McDonnell I'm even
more impressed. These guys could not help being geniuses...but they
chose
to be excellent human beings (Ken Iverson's gesture of dingy bills
[mentioned in Beginnings in http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm], Ian
Sharp's overall attitude [as listed in
http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/IPSA50.htm], and McDonnell's efforts to
make J accessible/fun)! I don't think I can find better role models (in
programming and real life) to emulate.
I don't know why I felt compelled to share this with all of you. I
guess,
just to tell you that all your work/efforts have impacted me, very
positively, and I appreciate it, as I'm sure many others do, very much.
Thanks,
Vijay.
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Devon McCormick, CFA
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