I came across http://waterstreetgm.org/throwing-in-the-towel-on-becomming-a-programmer/this on HN. And http://sdawncasey.wordpress.com/about/ in that page. Maybe these pages might be useful to consider how newcomers take to concepts. These pages are fascinating to me because it shows that even though these people have had prior experience with other languages they claim that they still don't understand programming. IMO, the emphasis on concepts and how J/APL can aid in these explorations is the best approach to teach programming. Actually Ken Iverson's explanation of Under (&.) [I read this on Ken Iverson's Quotations page] is one of the best explanations of a very commonly occurring programming idiom.
On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 12:51 PM, robert therriault <bobtherria...@mac.com>wrote: > Hi Henry and Raul, > > I think that the audience being young programmers is a good start towards > the issues that Raul raises. As an additional challenge, I think that we > would want to use an example that is user friendly once their interest has > been attracted. There are some areas of J that have more overhanging > learning curves than others :) I don't think we would want to get them > interested and then send them into the teeth of image processing unless we > also provided a good road map. > > Cheers, bob > > On Feb 15, 2014, at 9:36 AM, Henry Rich <henryhr...@nc.rr.com> wrote: > > > My idea about that is, we need to appeal to young programmers. The more > experience people have with scalar languages, the less able they are to > learn J. The more experience they have with other languages in a class > with J, the less they need to learn J. > > > > The application needs to be of obvious interest to a non-mathematical, > non-financial user. My target would be a scientist/engineer/IT person who > has a computation to perform and no canned package to do it, so they have > to write a little code. > > > > Henry Rich > > > > On 2/15/2014 12:30 PM, Raul Miller wrote: > >> Perhaps it is also worth noting that we are not going to impress > everyone, > >> nor should we want to. > >> > >> J currently caters to some high powered wallstreet types, high quality > >> engineering types and so on. But it's hardly the only language in use > for > >> any of those categories. > >> > >> ... anyways we should probably think a bit about qualities of the sort > of > >> people we think we want to attract with this video (or videos, since we > >> might want to attract different kinds of people). > >> > >> I'd also be tempted to enlist Cathrine Lathwell's advice on video > creation > >> - she has more than a little relevant experience. > >> > >> Thanks, > >> > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
