You speak for me, Dave.
Trouble is, the library was written by people who knew J well.
Therefore knowing J well has slipped in as a requirement for reading
the library. That is something hard to prevent.
Actually it isn't hard to prevent, just irksome. But I doubt expanding
abbreviations would help, of itself. The only way I know which works
is what we used to do at Hursley in the 1980s: debug prototype plus
help-stuff in a properly-equipped HF laboratory using test subjects
who were *not* developers themselves.
One-way glass, video cameras, keystroke logging, protocol analysis... the works.
It's a lot of hard graft, and ups the cost of the product. The project
manager never realises what's been done for him. But it sure shows in
the end-result.
Nobody does it these days. And that shows, too.
Ian
On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:19 PM, David Ward Lambert
<b49p23t...@stny.rr.com> wrote:
> Perhaps j would reach a larger audience if the documents were less
> abbreviated? One must surmount a hill to understand what the documents
> might be. Melvin Dewey cataloged libraries, but his simplified
> spellings---eg. Adirondak Loj---haven't grown deep root.
>
> I'll explain a low priority project I've been working on for a months,
> to which I don't want an external answer. It could help elucidate
> problems with j documents?
>
> I'd simply like to figure out how to increase the amount of information
> displayed.
>
> $ jconsole
> i.100
> 0 1 [omitted] 87 88...
>
> Neither "display" nor "output" are entries in my "ndx". Next I realize
> that by writing to a file I'll get full list. I start to investigate
> foreign conjunctions. However, not wanting to reinvent, I recall that j
> preloads file handling functions. The file name is a boxed string on
> the right---of something. Further study of the docs lead me to profile.
> Neither "profile" nor "standard profile" are in the "ndx". I give up
> because hunting for the file that might be "profile.ijs" and reading it
> aren't interesting now. Instead, I choose a smaller test case, thinking
> next time to lookup the z name space. ("z" also isn't found as an entry
> in my "ndx".)
>
> Hoping to expand the j community,
> Dave.
>
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