-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Terrence Brannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Any wet-behind-the-ears reader of this text is going to flip his wig > here. Just what is it about "1 that implies column addition instead of > row addition? <smile /> Some wet-behind-the-ears readers may have already lost their wigs by the time they got this far in J. <soapbox> More seriously, I recall somewhere reading that Ken thought one should learn J (and APL too, I guess) much as one learns a foreign (spoken) language: through doing it, as in a total immersion program. After having tried (years ago) to learn J as I had learned Algol and Pascal and other languages (by reading manuals and comprehending principles) and having failed, I figured out he was right, at least for me. The essence of learning J seems to involve being shown a toe-hold by the Primer, one of the other manuals, someone in this group, some of the many things you can find online, or (in my case) some of the old, ring-bound manuals I have from way back when, and then striking out from that place, seeing what works, seeing if I can make sense of it with more experiments and judicious use of the dictionary and manuals, filing away key idioms somewhere to aid my later recollection and use, and iterating on this process forever. I found (at least) two challenges when learning J (I guess I'm still learning, but I'm over a few humps already): it's nigh on to impossible to learn J without a computer at hand (and Ken and others have said that repeatedly), and some of the examples (you know who you are, examples!) require a bit of math or computational skill to understand. That turns out to be good, too, if a bit mind-stretching along the way in some cases, for it helps one to figure out mathematical approaches to common problems, and that helps when applying J elsewhere. I think Henry's J for C Programmers, Roger's Learning J, and other such documents are great, but I don't view them as the primary way to learn J effectively. It's a bit like when I learned German. In high school and college, I perused grammar books and dictionaries, and I took classes, read literature, and wrote papers, but I was always thinking in English and translating my work into or out of German. When I went to work in Germany, there was no more time to translate. I was lost at first, but, before too long, I began to think and dream in German. My grammar and pronounciation might not have improved much, but my ability to communicate by spoken or written German went up markedly, and I rarely thought in English anymore (except when doing arithmetic -- it's hard for me to add when the digits are in the opposite order to what I grew up with). JfC and LJ can provide some toeholds, but I think they're best for people who have already learned to speak J and want to get better (much as a grammar book may be best for those who can already speak German or French or Mandarin in a natural-sounding manner and who want help with more complex sentences or with constructing new sentence types that aren't yet part of their common usage). _That's_ the key for learning J, I think, and that's why I think it's important to get people's wigs a'flipping. So that wet-behind-the-ears reader might be well off by trying out "1, "0, "2, and who knows what else on both the original arrays and others of varying shapes to see what J says back. Maybe they'll figure out rank before they have to read about it! Just my $0.02, </soapbox> <smile /> Bill - -- Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/ Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: For more information, see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQFGeeqS3J3HaQTDvd8RAsGeAJ44+fGKSA3DF+AW0bWwC21tAct/lgCdEVPe IJqteKAT9ckZHdyfpA2ccGo= =Qcm2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
