On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 10:34 PM, Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't fancy your chances for a warm reception. The problem is, the > audience will not be able to believe that what you are doing is actually > programming. It will seem like something else altogether - rather as if > a chemist had shown up, mixed some beakers of stuff, and produced some > neat result. They will just dismiss it as not being applicable to their > lives.
I like using i. because it helps bridge one of those comprehension gaps. I think I would also go with # because of its analogy to select in sql, which a lot of people will have had some exposure to. (And if people start asking about joins, I would explain that they are actually a suite of operations, and that outer product and indexing cover two ends of that spectrum. J is, at its core, about representing how machines work. You can build up to set theory from there, but not in a 20 minute presentation.) That said, the audience might also have exposure to jQuery (which also has some J analogies, ironically enough). But jQuery's big forte is how heavily it leverages the browser document object model -- a subject J does not touch. So I would be careful making any references to jQuery (because then people may try -- and fail -- to think about reaching the DOM directly from J). -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
