On 4/4/07, Bill Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think learning J effectively is similar to learning a foreign language effectively. Yes, it helps to learn the grammar, but (as Ken or Chris or someone wrote in one of the J books) a good (the best?) way to learn a language is to practice in the presence of a laconic speaker that lets you do most of the talking but who does give you examples and feedback. That is, try the labs (listen), type something into J (speak to the interpreter), and see what you get. When you don't get what you want, listen some more, and try again (obviously having changed something).
that approach works well with Perl and Python. I tried it with J and was sent to the showers too many times speak of comfortably :) The play-around approach does not work with delicate tools or Vegas gambling and I found that it leads to misery with J... however the website marketing helped: "J is a data processing language..." and I was fascinated by the idea that J used "nouns" and "verbs" so i kept coming back.
(If you think you can't write some of the long tacit J sentences you see here rapidly [and I can't, at least to the degree I wish I could], think of those who speak or understand long, complex German sentences having most of the verb stuck at the end of the sentence with little problem
J for C has a chapter on this at the end. I will be pretty competent with that if I stick with this book (assuming Henry doesnt yank it off the site in a rage due to my constant harping... :)
I'm just cautioning you to think about your goal. If it's to use J as a highly productive way to think about and work with mathematical things
really, the first few labs were a big turn-off. I started thinking: "this language is only good for people doing linear algebra. all these labs are just like what I did in Linear Algebra. forget this language."
Does that help? I'm curious in your thoughts as you read this and integrate it with what you're experiencing.
a lot of J must be taught - when the representation for an empty list and a rank-1 array of shape 0 are both blank lines... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
