Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-01-20

Report on the J wiki meeting of January 20, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Will Gajate, Jon Hough, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

1. Will Gajate reported on the progress that he and Joe Bogner had made on the J playground. It is now housed on the J Github at https://github.com/jsoftware/j-playground . Currently, the version of J running in the browser is J804. Next steps will be to create a more usable interface for launch at the end of February and then transfer over to the 64 bit version of J903 (which is estimated to take about a month). This is progress beyond what had been expected and should prove to be a very useful tool in popularizing J.
2. Bob Therriault ran the first 10 seconds of a keynote video billboard meant to be an introduction of newcomers to J. Devon suggested changing 'J is an executable, mathematical notation' to 'J is a programmable, mathematical notation', as it would have more appeal to computer enthusiasts.
3. Devon pointed out that one of the entries on the J page about the Fibonacci sequence - https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Fibonacci_Sequence#Generating_functions - uses t. for Taylor series coefficients but this is no longer a feature in modern versions of J. It was suggested someone could come up with a J routine to replace this or we could simply remove this section as it is one of 10 methods illustrated. On further discussion, probably the best way to handle this is to put a note on the page that "t." has been discontinued and the methods in that section would work if someone would write a replacement for that verb.