Hello Last week, the Korean J users group had a joint meetup with the Smalltalk users group. We chose Game of Life( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life ) as a common problem and solved it in each one's own way and then compared the two different approaches, that is, J vs. smalltalk.
Since there were going to be mostly novices in either of languages in the workshop, the organizers of the two communities independently prepared a worked example(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect ) for each language before the workshop. Of course, the two approaches were substantially different. The J worked example I prepared is here: http://jaylang.org/wiki/index.php?title=%EB%AA%A8%EC%9E%8420121122 Even though the descriptions and instructions are in Korean, most of them are also in J code, so you may not have much difficulty following them. However, I think it is important to include a translation of one of the top paragraphs, which includes general heuristics for each implementation step(62 currently, including two quizzes at the end): ========== I recommend you go through the following activities for each steps: 1. Enter the line. (and press the enter key) 2. Guess what that line just did. 3. Based on that, make a hypothesis. (make assumptions, like it will do such and such) 4. Plan an experimentation, a variation from what you've just entered, based on that hypothesis. (If I enter this, such and such result will show up) 5. Conduct that experimentation and compare the result with your expectation. 6. If you feel confident to make a theory about it, proceed to the next line; otherwise, go back to the step 2 above. =========== Most of the people who followed the J example could understand some of the major ideas of J programming. They were impressed by the succinctness and some of them felt like they are back to kindergarden students. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
