That's certainly one way of looking at it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positioning_(marketing) might be another way of looking at this.
Look... if *all* you show is your product - no background, no context, no fun, then you might be quite successful at preaching to the choir (that would be us). But that should not be your target audience for a promotional video. Actually, thinking in terms of "target audiences" sort of misses the point. One point is that you do not know who your target audience is. That is up to your audience to decide. So you need to have a certain amount of respect for them. Some of the audience for your promotional video might hate J, and might just want to make fun of it. But if they are entertained by the video they might pass it on as a reference to their friends. Enough of this and you are going to reach people that would otherwise have never heard about the language. And some of them will be interested. Meanwhile, that interest is not going to blossom, full strength, just from watching a video. But having some familiarity with the language makes allows people to get used to the ideas and - later on, when they see mention of the language in other contexts - they can be a little more comfortable with it. Even if they originally decided it was wrong for them, at that time, people change their minds and sometimes people want to try things out. Now... with computing... a lot of the decisions about computing activities are "fad based". People make recommendations and other people follow systems of thought that [from a distance] seem completely arbitrary. So we might get hit by that at some point, if we have enough good things to show and if enough people know about what we can do. That will cause problems for us, especially if we don't have enough good solid people to absorb the shocks, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyways, my point is: if you want to put together a good J promotional video with no distractions, I think you should go ahead and do that. There's nothing stopping you, and we do need more awareness of what can be done with J. But that does not mean we need to be scared of other attempts which also attempt to entertain. If someone finds the sound track to be too much of a distraction, they can turn off the sound. If they simply do not like the video, they will go watch something else instead. But at this point our audience size is so small that I'm honestly not worried too much about being "too entertaining" or "too distracting". When you come right down to it, J is a programming *language*. Most people do not learn languages (programming or otherwise) purely for the joy of the language itself. They learn because of the people they want to exchange ideas with, because of the works they gain access to, because of the characteristics of those people and ideas. When you look out at other programming languages, are you going to want to learn a language because of some bit of code written in the language? Maybe? Or are you going to want to learn the language because people you respect express joy about using the language? Honestly? I can't answer how you would choose. But it bothers me to see us tearing down someone's work because it's "too upbeat". Actually, that bothers me a lot. We have a lot to be critical of, in our community. We have various bugs and problems that really need to be fixed. We have an arcane syntax which - if you put in the effort - is an incredibly powerful tool. But if we become popular you know that there will be people who just stare at it in bafflement and don't really see what's so good about it. They'll want to be using it for reasons they do not particularly understand and many of them will not have the years it takes to become fluent in the language. But that's nothing compared to the problems that people have just getting started. The problems of the depth of the language are balanced by the fact that for most applications you only need to use a small fraction of the language's power. And the rest can be sitting there, waiting for people to use *IF* it's acceptable to use it in the first place. Right now, J is acceptable to use in limited contexts. But we do not have much appeal to the sort of person that wants "distractions" (also known as: the sort of person who has other interests - perhaps things like food, sleep and/or music - believe it or not, I have heard that there are actually people who like the stuff). Anyways, I guess I'm saying that we have plenty of room for improvement but I feel like our community is still too small for this kind of harsh self criticism. Let's save that for the things that we really lack, ok? Thanks, -- Raul On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Murray Eisenberg <mur...@math.umass.edu>wrote: > Distractions are probably good in a promotional video only to the extent > that one wishes to divert attention from the product being promoted. > > Certainly relevant music can add to the impact of a presentation by > suggesting a mood, etc. But adding _irrelevant_ music is pointless. > > On Fri, 7 Mar 2014 19:45:47 -050, Raul Miller <rauldmil...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Distractions are probably good, to a certain extent, in a promotional > > video. Not everyone that watches the video is going to want to take > action > > immediately and start solving euler or investing in stocks or whatever > > else. Ideally, a promotional video should be fun enough that it can find > > its way through casually interested people to the seriously interested > > types. And, ideally, there will be enough information present that the > > serious types can find more (but that can go in the comments section). > > > > Of course, nothing is ever completely ideal. > > > > The 15 minute video is long enough that a set of "skip to topic" links > > would probably be nice. That way people in a hurry can take a look and > see > > if they want to watch something else instead. > > > > If people want to study, they should probably hit some of the existing > > documentation? > > > > For a promotional video we should instead, I think, focus more on issues > of > > appeal than issues of satisfaction. > > > > But of course, there's plenty of space on youtube for satisfaction based > > videos, also. > > > > On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Murray Eisenberg <mur...@math.umass.edu > >wrote: > > > >> 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.) > >> > > —— > 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
