Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-01-27

Report on the J wiki meeting of January 27, 2022

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

1. Will Gajate reported very good progress on the J playground with Joe Bogner managing to get j903 working. Joe continues to do amazing work and is providing a great contribution to the J community. The next step is to develop the user interface using a similar style to https://razetime.github.io/bqn-repl/ a website developed to run BQN on the browser.
2. Bob then initiated discussion about the audiences that we may want to target for the J landing page and video. The feeling was that it broke down into 4 main groups:
   1. the math lovers
   2. the math phobic
   3. users of tools such as Excel
   4. a growing group of functional programmers who may be interested in algorithms and combinators (seems to be much more common with the younger demographic).
3. The sense was that the billboard video should not go into much detail for any of these groups because its job is to attract the attention of general viewers and direct them to the area that they may be interested in. The best way to do this may be to focus on how J makes the computer easier to use, which is a theme that henry Rich and others have suggested on the general forum. This could appeal to the math phobic because the message to them would be how the computer could make calculation much easier, this may also interest the math lovers because of the extensive tools that J provides. There could also be references to the use of Excel, jd and other applications that the professional may be interested in. A slight mention of the functional aspects of the language may be enough to interest the combinator fans.
4. There was also a discussion of the landing page prototype that Bob had created https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/prototype_landing_page and there was a consensus that it needs mainly to identify what J is and then have links to the different audiences that might be interested. Those audiences would be beginners looking for resources, practitioners looking for reference material and general community links to fora, media or other links to array languages. The links on the landing page would take users to the area that they were interested in and then provide further self selection to get them to the area that they require. Devon indicated that he would also provide a prototype to further explore the possibilities of the design. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/prototype_landing_pageDHM Both prototype pages should be considered as experiments that are under development. Feedback is welcome on the discussion page tab on each prototype.
5. That was followed by a discussion about how best to generate feedback as work proceeds on the different proposals. Use of the discussion pages for feedback was recommended as well as links to the different proposals on the pages, so that comparison would be easier.
6. Art Anger then showed a reference diagram of the terminology connections at the bottom of his Where to Start J document. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Where_to_Start This diagram showed that some areas are much more interlinked than others and this is something that will be useful when it comes to actually establishing a curriculum for the different learning streams going forward.

Bob Therriault (talk) 05:08, 29 January 2022 (UTC)