Dan,
I would like to react to your proposal.
On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Dan Bron wrote:
+ I really think a dependable, cohesive IRC community would
+ be a boon to J, particularly for garnering and retaining
+ new talent. But J IRC community didn't pan out.
I participated for a short while in one of the IRC's
and did enjoy it considerably. It was in a rather early
period of the IRC when the jeval system was being developed
and tested. I thought that was a rewarding experience and I
had plenty of time at that time to hang out and visit with
the JIRCers like I was in either participating in our
lurking behind a product development process. There were
other things going on, especially some new J programmers
were being guided by truly gifted and giving experienced J
mavens.
+
+ I think that was mostly because we didn't have enough
+ participants, and I think we didn't have many participants
+ because of the technological hurdles associated with IRC.
For me the productive hang out time became small
relative to rewards after a while and I drifted away. I
think much of the time the forums are the correct level of
activity for me.
But for project development and for intense
tutoring, and likely for other reasons, the IRC can not be
beat. I think your JIRC would be an especially wonderful
virtual meeting place like the NYJUG is a physical meeting
place, where people schedule to get together and have a
loose agenda. And also it would be great if people could use
the forums to invite folks offline --- no, I guess that
would be inviting folks online -- to the IRC to work on a
problem. (If that got popular, I guess people would have to
learn to avoid trampling on one another's conversations --
but as I recall IRC permits partitioned conversations
pretty handily.)
+
+ But I think we can solve that. There have been websites
+ that serve IRC for years, but only with the advent of AJAX
+ have they become really useful (before AJAX, web pages
+ didn't lend themselves well as highly responsive,
+ interactive, desktop-type applications).
So, I guess I am getting encouraged as I pen this
message that if people will just set up the system on their
computers, then if someone sets up a meeting time and a
topic/time schedule, there might be some fun had. And then
once enough folks get familiar with the medium, maybe other
uses can be found for the JIRC.
[snip]
+
+ -Dan
+
+
(B=)
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