You touch on a lot of subjects here. Generally speaking, the forums are probably the right place to start, when you feel lost.
We should also make an effort to cross link related documentation better. That would help the search engines give you more meaningful answers (though there will still be some efforts involved). And, for now, probably the best way of finding J specific documentation involves limiting your search to site:jsoftware.com (though sometimes keywords like jprogramming or jsoftware work just as well or better). I presume when you ask about 'load' syntax you are referring to the syntax of the strings which you can pass to load. A full understanding of that topic would amount to a complete index of all loadable files. Daunting. But if you just want the ~name prefix part of the syntax you'd probably want to start here: http://jsoftware.com/help/user/dirpaths.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/26.htm Another approach involves reading (or skimming over) the definition of load - it's sitting right there and should lead you to wanting to know the values of SystemFolders_j_ and UserFolders_j_ Of course, this also requires you understand locales. I would be very hesitant about calling locales "non-standard". If you mean that they do not fit in the ascii standard or the c standard, that would of course be correct. But that is because those standards are not meant to define J. If you mean that no standards body has created a J standard, that is also appropriate - we do not have a big enough of a community to support that kind of activity. But that also means that you can and should expect reasonable responses here on the forums. For now, J is stable enough to be thought of as a "defacto standard" and there's also the related concept of a "dictionary" standard. Anyways, for locales, here's a fair bit of reading on the topic: http://www.jsoftware.com/primer/locale.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dx018.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/primer/z_locale.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/24.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/jforc/modular_code.htm Or, if you like, we could probably define the essence of locales in a paragraph or three? Useful analogies for thinking about locales include: directories (and paths), namespaces, classes (and objects), and stack frames. And I see that Pascal Jasmin has also posted a response here (quite a bit more succinct than my own). I'd definitely read that response. I hope this helps, -- Raul On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:18 PM, Yike Lu <yikelu.h...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey everybody, I'm new to the forum. I got involved with vector languages > when I had to learn q for a job. I have since moved on from that job and > lost q, so I've been looking for a suitable replacement ever since. I tried > J here and there, but the things I learned never really stuck. I went to > one or two meet ups at the NYJUG (met Devon there). My programming > background includes C++, R, q, python, and a sprinkling of Scheme. > > I decided to pick up learning J again. I have some feedback on the first > few hours that I went through, hopefully it's useful information and others > have the same problems: > > 1. I wanted to tackle a problem I already had, or already have solved. Data > being what it is, that usually means a pre-existing data set, often in CSV > format. > 2. I found the csv package, quite nice. > 3. For some reason my Qt IDE broke. So I had to use jconsole and pacman. > This took me longer than expected to find. Until then, I was just praying > the IDE would come back so I could use the package manager. > 4. JDB specifically -- no mention of the JMF dependency? Bad call. I was > confused for 20 minutes. > 5. load operator syntax and path -- where is this documented? I figured out > the JHOME/addons directory is part of it. Can I add to or change it the > path? > 6. How to load a script? load confused me because the syntax suggested it > loads the whole directory (although I later found out this wasn't the > case). I eventually found > http://www.jsoftware.com/docs/help701/learning/26.htm > 7. Locales? A lot of the packages use more advanced features like OOP and > locales, and it's very disorienting at first, especially with the non > standard Name__Locale syntax. > > At the end of the day, my use case and learning approach can be summed up > as follows: > * I have a pre existing problem that I have solved. I would like to be able > to use J to solve it, potentially more quickly or more elegantly. > * In theory, this should require a simple mapping of basic concepts from > one language to another, plus a generous helping of library functions. > * How do I do it in J? Take a direct, focused approach to getting the > basics handled (data loading and selection for example). This gets me to a > stable point of reference. > * What can I do next in J? This is more exploratory learning. I have the > data loaded and I know how to do basic operations. Build on this knowledge. > > The wiki documentation so far makes this unnecessarily painful. Remember we > don't have a meaningful StackOverflow presence or easily Google-able > answers. There's a million tutorials on how to do basic array > manipulations, and they're all front and center. The OO, script loading, > locales seemed to be buried further back. > > Also, my general feeling reading through the docs is that they're pretty > scattered on those topics. > > I've started a github repo where I'm keeping some utilities I'm developing > around table manipulation: https://github.com/yikelu/j_table > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
