I had also taken a look when you first wrote,
found some places where I would have too rapidly
uttered disagreement and so kept quiet, waiting
for things to develop.

In the meantime I thought about translating the
contents of the presentation I used when teaching
J to pupils in order to show the approach I took,
hopefully encouraging discussions about differences.

One thing I wanted to mention, for example, is that
I had them try dyadic +, -, * which worked as expected;
told them about % and let them try it;
and told them to experiment
• with monadic use
 (what’s the common pattern here?
  x defaults to the neutral element except for *)
• with the : inflection (monadic use)
 (what’s the common pattern here?
  (+:-:+~); (*:-:*~);
  +: is to -: what + is to -;
  *: is to %: what * is to %;
 (well, not exactly, but you get the point))
Finding (or at least being told and seeing) these patterns
makes them far more easily memorizable in my opinion.

I’ll have a look at your new pages tomorrow.


Am 18.01.21 um 17:51 schrieb Arnab Chakraborty:
> Dear all,
> 
>    While teaching numerical analysis using J for half a semester (then
> COVID started), I have amassed some J code chunks that do something useful,
> while avoiding J magic as much as possible. I thought I would turn them
> into a simple J tutorial that might benefit other newcomers like myself.
> Though I was hooked(!) by the wow-factor of J, I continued to wonder for a
> long time as to why I should learn J. What benefit does it give me other
> than writing code that is one tenth the size of a program in another
> language (and takes about 20 times more time to write and debug)? Finally,
> I think I have found an answer that I can explain to a beginner in a few
> words.
> 
> My tutorial is written from that perspective. It would be great if the
> experts in this forum could please take a quick look at the tutorial and
> tell me if my approach would do more harm than good to newcomers.
> 
> The tutorial is at
> 
> https://arnabc74.github.io/jsoft/
> 
> It is still growing.
> 
> Thanks and regards,
> 
> Arnab
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> 

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