The word “animations” in connection with J jogged my memory of some evening entertainments held at APL conferences years ago. On a couple of occasions, a quizmaster (Roy Sykes?) recruited two teams of APL programmers from the audience. Each team’s members stood in a row, with the members holding cards bearing consecutive numbers from 1, 2, . . ., 12 (or maybe it was 6 or 8). The team represented a vector V. The quizmaster showed a card with a sentence built up from V, e.g., a reshape into a matrix or then some transpose. Each team’s members had to rearrange themselves into the array representing the result of evaluating that sentence. The winner of each round was the team that finished correctly first.
Such dynamic and physical representations can be very effective in learning an array-processing language. For some of the Mathematica programming language’s array-processing operations, a very effective, on-line dynamic presentation exists: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/flash/ That kind of animation might be very useful to novice (and even not-so-novice) J programmers. On Thu, 23 Jan 2014 12:56:19 +0000, Ian Clark <earthspo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Yes I thought the animations were appealing when they first appeared. No > feedback yet on whether they actually help people? -- I'll have to rely on > you and others to collect that info from genuine novices.. . > —— Murray Eisenberg mur...@math.umass.edu Mathematics & Statistics Dept. Lederle Graduate Research Tower phone 240 246-7240 (H) University of Massachusetts 710 North Pleasant Street Amherst, MA 01003-9305 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
