Thanks, Johann. We need to be hearing a lot more like this.
As I said, I'm willing to act as a focal point for novice-identified
holes in the documentation.
Mostly I guess I'll just be pulling plums from the forums pie.
I'll forbear to propose answers, much less THE answer. Let me just say
I'm (now) aware of the existence of...
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/Language%20FAQ
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/General%20FAQ
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/BeginnerQuestionsCompilation
These could be the first resort of a novice, were they to be kept up.
(...notice the weasel gerundive :)
And I buy Björn's point that, to be novice-friendly, J6 and J7 (JHS
and GTK) will eventually need their own documentation.
(...eyes-to-heaven)
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Johann Hibschman
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Ian Clark <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Can you please keep notes of your stumbles with the existing
>> documentation? Feel free to pm me with them. There will be questions
>> you'll have that you simply would not think to ask in a couple of
>> months. This does not invalidate them.
>
> I've been playing with J for almost two years now, ever since I switched
> jobs and no longer had q/kdb+ available[1], and I still feel like I don't
> have a good grasp of how the "system" side of J works.
>
> By that, I mean things like the details of name resolution in
> load/require[2], what verbs are defined in _z_, what is available in the
> various packages, etc. I just noticed that JForC has more information
> on this than I remembered; I don't think I got that far into it the
> first time around.
>
> Things that would help would be:
>
> 1. Better links to the documentation on packages. It took me a
> surprisingly long time to find the "Addons" page on the wiki.
>
> 2. Something like R's "Task Views" that give some introduction and
> links to relavant packages for various higher-level topics. See
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ for examples.
>
> Many descriptions of J focus on its mathematical calculator aspects,
> without giving much guidance for how to use it for "real work".
>
> Regards,
> Johann
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
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For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
