Thanks for that Murray, I had not seen the Mathematica flash animations before. Also, your example of physically representing the array functions is close to the core of my understanding of J programming. Not that I need physical manifestations but that I think of the arrays and vectors as physical objects that functions transmute into results.
Cheers, bob On Jan 23, 2014, at 5:48 PM, Murray Eisenberg <mur...@math.umass.edu> wrote: > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
