== Report of Meeting 2023-05-18 == Present: John Baker, Ed Gottsman, Dave Lambert 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_2023-05-18 1) Ed did not have an update on the J wiki as he is still reviewing the session that Bob had with Stephen Therriault. Ed said he was looking forward to having a session with Stephen in the future, as Ed feels that Stephen has reservations that he would like to explore in search of consensus on the J wiki viewer. 2) The second item was the rebranding of J as the J programming language. John felt that there are not that many primary sources of J information, but that using the term J Programming Language might seem easier for Google searches. Ed wondered what the abbreviation might be and felt that the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory might have issues with that. Ed asked what the motivation for the discussion was. It was agreed that there are not that many sources of information about J, although many people wish that there were more. Dave mentioned that using site:jsoftware.com in a Google search was one way to limit the results of hits and the wiki is also a good source of information. Ed said that Stack Overflow has a <j> tag that is used. John mentioned that it might be a good idea to have a wiki page that lists GitHub repos that have J. Bob added that the new J Wiki Browser has a Bookmark button that allows you to add and remove bookmarks of useful pages. 3) A further discussion of using "jios' for the iOS applicatons. This was suggested by Ian Clark as Apple had pushed back on renaming the versions by their version numbers. As it is, J701 is separate from J903, but going forward the "jios" would be used for the umbrella name of the J903 versions. There was some discussion of Ian building a subset of J using Swift, as an investigation into the interface. Ed suggested that there would be howls of protest over which primitives had been selected if it were ever released. This lead to a discussion about whether the number of primitives was an impediment to learning the language. Generally it was felt that there are many languages that are much larger and that the number of primitives should not be an issue. John wondered whether the definition of a variable name in J might include unicode. Consensus was that there would not be any problems with using "jios" as the application name. 4) As an extra item, John asked about the new modular arithmetic that had been added. He felt it was useful for using clocks and other cyclical calculations and had really speeded up with addition of the .gmp extended functionality. Dave found it useful for Project Euler questions. 5) Fold was discussed as an operator that is written in J so was a bit slower than what it would be if it were written in C. Fold was useful for a number of reasons, not the least that it allows J to mirror other languages which have different versions of Fold. J seems to have all the options covered. 6) John asked about the new additions to the Sequential Machine. All agreed that it can be difficult to program, but once programmed is quite useful. The new additions may allow it to apply to a wider number of applications. Dave mentioned that he had considered some type of an interface to program the state machines. 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 May 25th, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
