Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-02-10

Report on the J wiki meeting of February 10, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Will Gajate, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault.

1. Will updated the progress made on the J playground. It is now up and running for your consideration. https://wgajate.github.io/jsource/bin/html/emj.html During the meeting we temporarily switched the font to Courier, which improved the display of boxed types. Next steps will be to work on the IDE so that it is closer to the JHS or IDE approach of menus across the top of the area. A future target will be to enable the foreign conjunctions that may be necessary in order to include labs in the playground.
2. Bob previewed the draft version of the billboard video which was put up on YouTube just before the meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV936cVrN0I . It was received well, with Art pointing out that the reference to pipes linking to the plumber's metaphor might need to be a bit stronger and that there definitely needs to be a pause and restart option when viewing as there is a lot of information that would face the newcomer. This functionality is available if we host with YouTube, but if we choose to host J's servers would need to have a interface written that allows for that. Raul pointed out that we should have a link at the end of the video for the resources, but upon further investigation Bob doesn't meet the requirements to be a Youtube associate, which means clickable links are not available. In a future version, Bob will include at least a web address for those who are not already on the wiki when they are viewing. What is more interesting is the response that it has got from the wider array programming community. To begin, even before we finished the meeting YouTube provided this excellent critical response.
   

Brian Rice -- Okay this is a good script, and the pacing is also great. I admire J, but this made me feel more like I could like J. But I think you should work on your audio, whether it’s microphone choice or placement, or in audio processing, an audio track with fewer or softer mouth noises will be less distracting and help people focus more easily on your message.

At the time of writing, this has been followed by:

Programming Siri -- Thanks, I love J. More of these please, especially tacit programs

Rodrigo Girão Serrão -- Watching this made me want to quit APL, Python, and all other languages, and just pick up J (:

michaelmanti -- Brilliant video, Bob. Really shows off what's so attractive about J for analytical use cases--even those where the data aren't numbers.

And then it was put up on the APL_farm discord (a forum for APL,K,BQN and J), where current array programming enthusiasts responded.

South — Yesterday at 5:24 PM -- damn yeah this video rocks. i laughed when i saw how easy it is to plot data

milia — Yesterday at 10:12 PM -- What a great teaser ! Great work Bob ! Can we share this already online ?

awagga — Today at 5:02 AM -- Totally a great video, I'm almost convinced to switch ;)

rak1507 — Today at 9:18 AM -- really nice video love the emphasis on just doing things simply and easily

xash — Today at 11:03 AM -- To repeat what other have said: really nice video! Showed it some colleagues and they are finally interested in J now, my ramblings weren't as effective.

In any case, we are more interested in the response of users of the forum as well, but also any non-array programmers who you might know.

3. The next topic was the J wiki landing page. I had not done much work on it in the last week and plan put more attention to it in the coming week. This brought up a discussion on how to make changes to the wiki while it is still in use. A bit like constructing an airplane in flight. Art suggested parallel wikis. Bob wondered if that would be effective, since people tend to stay with what they know even when the new thing has benefits. This will be a discussion that continues as we get closer to putting in these changes.