Good ideas Raul, I like the purpose driven approach of using J in a practical environment. I also think that the current labs provide a much more powerful and interactive way to allow learners to explore new concepts. As I think of areas to explore in the process of communicating J, I am leaning towards developing the lab as a medium for my message.
Also, I have been thinking that the way we display the language could have a significant effect on the amount of documentation that the user requires. The different options of the 5!: foreign conjunction [1] are a beginning to this, but in the current html5 environment of JHS with tools such as CSS and SVG we may be able to make the relationships between the different entities even more obvious. If the user is reminded of the function at every turn through design of the display, many areas that are hard to grasp may become much more intuitive. My experiments in the shape and type display may serve as examples of this [2], but could be extended to the ways that tacit verbs could be represented. Cheers, bob [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dx005.htm [2] http://bobtherriault.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/an-update-on-display-shapes-and-types-on-jhs/ On Apr 30, 2014, at 1:38 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > But perhaps writing textbooks on interesting subjects could be a more > useful investment of time. For example, I would really like to see a > textbook on finite element analysis which centered around using J to > develop the requisite techniques. I would also like to see one written on > antenna theory. I remember in college doing some interesting work with > x-ray analysis of crystals using APL, and that was with computers far less > capable than what we have nowadays, and APL was far less capable than J is > nowadays. > > So it seems like it really ought to be straightforward to write decent > treatments of engineering topics - topics related to making things - in J. > There's also a need for other things, of course, but some things seem just > so obvious that they are aching for attention. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
