Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-03-03

Report on the J wiki meeting of March 3, 2022

Present: Art Anger, John Baker, Jon Hough, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

Bob presented an update on the J playground https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html/emj.html There has been a lot of work done on this, including a multiline script development area as well as drop down links that will provide a more JHS like interface. Issues that are spotted can be reported at https://github.com/jsoftware/j-playground/issues. A recent email from Eric Iverson suggests that there may be opportunities to make use of the J playground as a full implementation of a J interface. Although, this will involve a lot of work, it is a good target to have as we move forward. Bob's previous idea of having NuVoc contain the J playground have been replaced with the much more sensible idea of having the playground contain a context sensitive search to open NuVoc at the appropriate page for the user. Jon mentioned that he was pretty much staying out of Joe's way at this point, since Joe seems to know what he is doing, and will be more involved as opportunities arise. Jon is wondering whether we are staying with a playground as a demo or advancing the platform further and will watch as things develop. Also, we looked at a browser interface for the BQN language which provided syntactic colouring and partial evaluation. It can be accessed here: https://bqnpad.mechanize.systems

Then there was a discussion of the next two months of development. Bob played a video and proposed that a weekly video report be made to engage the community and provide a way for responses to reach the J wiki group over the next 2 months. Devon suggested that we keep steady drumbeat on the wiki as it is a big task and focus on growing the community involvement, providing opportunities to contribute. He mentioned that there are many NYCJUG minutes that require development and the knowledge that is contained in those materials is substantial. Bob suggested using categories in the pages may be an effective way of organizing this information, although that would require substantial curation. Devon mentioned that Stephen Taylor who is currently the kX librarian would be a good resource for tackling that kind of a problem and Bob agreed to follow up with Stephen to see how kX systems may have handled this. Bob mentioned the importance of having tasks for the contributors that do not exceed their skills and are also structured enough that they can be accomplished in a useful way. Devon suggested that we let the community know that we have reached a point of evaluation and that we seek their involvement. Bob agreed to draft a message and run it past the jwiki group for evaluation before sending it out.

Devon asked if we were doing anything for Pi day (March 14). The group thought that it represented an opportunity to show off what J can do and Raul provided a quick way to obtain arbitrary digits of pi dpi=: <.@o.@(10x ^ ]) Devon said that he would take a run at producing a video for Pi day to promote J.

The final topic was the process we will take to move the pages that are currently hosted on the jsoftware site over to the J wiki. Bob felt that this was important because having information split between the two areas can be a cause of confusion for the user. Raul mentioned that there were some areas such as the old vocabulary that may be difficult to move across without changing their functionality. Bob suggested that the Essays and perhaps Phrases could be moved over as a test and then tackle the more challenging transfers once we have more experience. (Subsequent to the meeting Raul has found that the transfer may be easier than he thought originally)