Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-04-28

Report on the J wiki meeting of April 28, 2022

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

1. The J playground https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html2/# is commended for doing a good job of eliciting feedback and it seems to be progressing well through the good work of Joe Bogner and Jon Hough. Issues with lab instructions that are carry overs from the different environments that the labs are run in. John Baker raises the point that when it goes live we may be able to get even more feedback. Raul suggests that it is their call and Bob admits that he has been promoting it as a beta. The feeling is that we will not be creating a links to the wiki until they have settled on a url. There was a brief discussion of whether there would be an option to group program in J using VPN and the Playground, but just thoughts and dreams at this point. Bob will get in touch with Joe about whether there is video support required for the Playground and how it works with the landing page in the wiki.
2. Some discussion about how the labs might need to developed and Devon suggests a project based learning approach to labs. This leads to the J project format with scripts and it is thought that it is a resource that is underused and may benefit from some more documentation with regard to using tests and structuring the scripts within the project. Devon wonders about a lab specifically for projects. Possibly there are more addons that might be good topics for project based learning. Devon talked about an approach that he had for diffusion limited aggregation https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Devon_McCormick/DLA/TOC that may be a topic of a future lab.
3. Raul talks about bringing the books across from jsoftware to the wiki organized by the category system to track the verification that is required. Devon had sent an email that suggested a category structure that would be able to track the progress made on a page as it is verified. It was suggested that the images that are broken on the jQt documentation might be used as a test of how to work together effectively as we fix those links.
4. Potential for a Rosetta Stone across the different programming languages that will allow comparison between the common terms and primitives that each language has and would allow users to come up to speed a little more easily with J.
5. We set the end of May as the target for launching new version of the J wiki with the WikiMedia version updated in advance so that we have a solid platform for our launch.
6. Art Anger suggests that the article that he brought forward requires a focus and a direction of a benevolent dictator. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/5/260353-it-takes-a-community/fulltext Devon suggests using a way of measuring contribution to motivate volunteers to participate. This will be an ongoing discussion. It is also proposed that we focus on building tools that may encourage more participation.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development