> From: Don Watson > > You state: > > "My advice would be not to confuse your target audience with tacit to > start > with (whether it is J's version of tacit or yours)." > > I would agree with that statement, but comment that all existing J > documentation gets to tacit quickly. There is minimal documentation on > explicit J.
Are you interested in helping rectify that? > You state: > > "As I see it the only > thing stopping you from going down that route at the moment is that you > don't like the syntax of: > > myverb=: verb def '(x + y) - (x * y)' > > I think you'll have much less resistance to the above than to this > below: > > myverb=: (([) + (])) - ([) * NB. I think this is the equivalent > in > your tacit notation?!?" > > Tacit programming is central to what J is. The ASCII > keyboard and tacit programming seem to me to be the two most > fundamental and central additions that J has over the APL that I knew > - I do not know what has been added to APL since. I am not prepared > to use J without the equivalent of tacit programming. > > Every Computer language has Computer Science > business trappings like: verb def ' ' . They don't belong in > Mathematics. > > Actually the relevant notation would be: > > myverb=: (([) +) - ([) * > > The right argument is automatically brought in to the left of a > right > parenthesis - except when a left argument is indicated and, of course, > to the right of the last verb. I have 11 characters in my definition. > You have 20. And if we are talking elegance, a fundament objective of > Mathematics, I would argue that mine is more elegant than yours. > At times you argue that certain aspects of J will put off your target audience because it is different to what they are used to and should therefore be changed (in S), at other times you argue that elegance is more important. It seems to me that what is needed is some actual data to back up what _is_ actually important. A number of contributors to this thread have described their actual experiences with students and report few issues. I turned my session on mean & stddev into a quick J Lab and asked my son and daughter (11 & 13) to have a go. They didn't seem to have any problems with the symbols. I asked them what the hardest bit was - their answer was it was the sentence describing how to calculate the standard deviation (they needed some extra info too on what the standard deviation was and why it was useful not having come across it yet at school). After completing the following steps of the lab: +/y 24 #y 6 24 % 6 4 The 11 year old said "so can you do this ..." and proceeded to write: +/y % #y I was prepared to explain why brackets were required to get the correct answer but of course the answer J gave was 4. I did a quick double take and then realised I just had to explain why it was _better_ to do (+/y) % #y. It seems to me that the evidence to this point suggests that students will not have any great difficulty with J. I suspect convincing adult teachers will be harder but maybe the first step should be to try it on a few and get some feedback from them on what they find compelling/daunting about J. I think Fraser makes some very good points about the need to make the learning environment richer. Visualisation tools like plot, grid and viewmat would be worthwhile building into a session to be presented to teachers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
