Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-07-07

Report on the J wiki meeting of July 07, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller, Devon McCormick, Raghu Ranganathan, Bob Therriault

1. Chris and Raul completed the transfer of Essays, Books and some of the Help indices from the jsoftware site across to the current J wiki in early June. The navigation bar to access these materials can be found at https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help. Note that the old Dictionary, the old Vocabulary, and the Foreign Conjunctions are still external links on the Jsoftware site. This duplicates the move that had been made earlier to the prototype wiki. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help
2. Raul demos his streamlined version of indices that would allow users to search by keyword alphabetically. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Index_A This is similar to the j807 search but uses expansion components to allow the user to focus on the keywords. Raghu wondered if there could be a more user friendly navigation bar. Raul pointed out that the navigation bar is consistent across the J wiki interface and hovering over the navigation item reveals additional information.
3. Raghu asks about the editor log for the J Playground mentioned in correspondence and whether there is a direction that the wiki would like to go in this implementation. https://github.com/jsoftware/j-playground/issues/66 Devon says that he has created a workspace functionality in J that he uses personally. Bob says the concern that he has is that the J Playground has had a guiding principal of introducing J to a new user on the browser. The challenge is that the web environment may require a different approach to saving local storage. Raghu suggests that it could be an autosave upon page closing with a timestamp and then the user could access the editor logs from the playground so that they could recreate the state of the page. Bob suggests that although the wiki will be working with the J Playground, it seems that it may be a good idea to bring in Eric, Chris and Henry to get a sense of the way that the J Playground will work with other J interfaces. Devon wonders if it would be a problem if the J Playground exceeds the capabilities of the current interfaces. Raul and Bob don't really see that as a problem, but it does suggest that questions about where the Playground could be best used within the current J environment would be good to address with the wider J community. One of the challenges for the J Playground is, if it were to be used in a production environment, how a debugger could be implemented on a web browser. Raul suggests it would be based on the current 13!: foreigns, but that there might be an issue with hitting a stop in a verb in the playground which would give a javascript popup and attempting to close that javascript popup would bring it back up again. So there would be no way to regain control of that browser session unless you closed the window. More recently, setting stops seems to have been completely disabled in the playground. Raghu feels that if debugging were needed that could be a significant amount of work. Bob says that he will contact Joe and see if there is interest in a meeting for a wider discussion the J Playground.
4. Devon thinks that beginners go to the wiki for introductory materials, but the main purpose of the wiki is to provide information and so it needs to be easily searchable. Raul wonders if there is an opportunity to let the beginners know the areas that they would need to learn to become more proficient. Bob refers to Jeremy Howard's study group in APL where he is covering the primitive glyphs first so that the definitions can be understood and the language could be further explored. There may be an opportunity for a future book or lab that might take this approach or perhaps the way the wiki is constructed. Raghu suggests that the wiki may not be the place for tutorials, but a place that is easily searchable and the links would take you to the different resources.
5. Raghu also suggests that a Rosetta Stone on the wiki would be useful so that a person who is familiar with a language would be able to find the corresponding J terms. Art suggests the different languages translated into J terms. Bob wonders if there could be a Nuvoc limited search for language terms. Art suggests a spreadsheet link that would allow the user to find their language and the translations. Raul suggests that there is work to do with the information on the add-ons and Bob thinks that is more of a content problem than a wiki structure problem. Raghu and Devon think that a better format is to have a page that is set up for each language that compares those languages to J, so that there is a reduction in the noise. Raghu thinks that the BQN - J and APL - BQN pages would be useful. BQN to J https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/fromJ.html BQN to Dyalog APL https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/fromDyalog.html
6. Bob demos APLcart as a model for how J phrases may be improved. https://aplcart.info/ BQN has also done this https://mlochbaum.github.io/bqncrate/ These have more dynamic searches that will allow users to enter keywords and be given suggestions of code that may be appropriate. Raghu says that he is familiar with both of these and would be willing to help out with this transfer. Raul says he will provide the code that he used to import the Phrases to Raghu. Raghu asks if there are any specific areas that would be useful for him to work in. Devon suggests that working on the Rosetta page would be a start, but that it would be a good question for the more general J playground group when and if that meeting takes place.
7. Bob says that over the next few weeks the group can do experiments in the prototype yellow J wiki, although it would be a good idea to start with a small scale of the experiment and increase the scale as feedback from the group comes in.

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