A comment on Roger's comment as well as some comments on other aspects of the 
video.

(1) In fact, I find the sound background not just superfluous, but distracting. 
(Yes, I know that's why we have a mute function on our computers' sound 
controls.)

(2) The background globe graphic is a bit distracting, too. Clearly _some_ kind 
of background was needed for the horizontal scrolling banners; perhaps just a 
plain background or a simple color gradient would be better. (I find such 
irrelevant backgrounds akin to the sort of "chart junk" that Tufte inveighs 
against.)

(3) There's steep jump in code length from the couple of examples done in 
immediate-execution mode to the scripts for the GUI examples. In fact, looking 
at the quick scroll through the GUI code scripts, those not already familiar 
with J might wonder why bother to learn a new language if the code is still so 
long (unless they've coded enough to realize that in language they already use, 
the code would probably be orders of magnitude larger).

(4) The two GUI examples are quite nice!

(5) Perhaps in place of one of the Euler contest problems, something 
manipulating text would make the whole thing more meaningful to a larger body 
of potential users.

(6) Re Euler Problem 20: At first I found it surprising that the solution 
involved converting !100x into a string, forming the list of characters in that 
string, and then converting the characters to their digit equivalents. That is, 
I was a bit surprised that the primitives didn't already provide a facility for 
extracting the integer digits of an integer (or generalizations to other 
bases). Have I forgotten something?

(7) It would be useful if the video provide download links for the files used 
in the GUIs (and, for that matter, script records of the immediate-execution 
examples).



On Fri, 7 Mar 2014 10:17:19 -0800, Roger Hui <rogerhui.can...@gmail.com> wrote:

> V. nice.
> 
> I note that the video basically does not make use of sound in the sense the
> if you mute it, the information content is the same.  The video
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs (Sudoku in APL, by John
> Scholes) has a different approach wrt sound.  From what I understand the
> narration is difficult to do well and required lots of practice.
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:11 AM, Martin Saurer <martin.sau...@bluewin.ch>wrote:
> 
>> ...My two cents (or 15 minutes) to show what J can do.
>> 
>> Feedback is welcome.
>> 
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJpJt3c11c>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJpJt3c11c

——
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






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