Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-09-01

Report of Meeting 2022-09-01

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

1. Bob spoke about the categorization of Essays and commended Thomas McGuire, Paul Jackson and Devon McCormick for their work in categorizing some of the essays. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?hidebots=1&limit=100&days=30&enhanced=1&urlversion=2 Bob had also noticed that Categories can have words separated that makes them a bit more searchable. The example of 'Extended Precision' was given and it was noted by Raul that some terms could span across different contexts. Bob mentioned that with the upcoming improvement in the search engine that allows searches based on categories should be able to restrict context. Bob mentioned that all the essays should probably have the tag although that may be best populated by a bot across areas like essays or specific books such as "50 shades of J"
2. A discussion of addons structure and it is certainly a mixed up structure at the moment. The JAL Guide https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/JAL/User_Guide has some good information, but addons are accessed through the Package Manager in JQt, Pacman in JHS and across different pages in the wiki including the Vocabulary/Library https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/Libraries . Bob suggests creating a prototype structure that is more consistent in the Yellow wiki before doing the changes in the Blue wiki. Links within the wiki could be updated but external links would need to be accommodated through redirects. Bob will take look at that in the next week and try to create a flatter more accessible structure. The suggestion would be to use the name addons to consistently refer to them and if this were to be approved may be used consistently across the menus and pop ups of the different environments.
3. Devon mentioned that he had been looking to put some of his scripts into an add-on, but had run into issues with having the required files showing up in the different files so that the user would be able to run them consistently. Bob mentioned that he had used a meta file that would choose between different versions of the Jig add-on depending on the versions of J.
4. Bob showed a curated set of bookmarks and other media links that he had put together on his user page https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Bob_Therriault. Future improvements could be made to create collapsible lists and reordering the list. Bob then showed what Ian Clark had done with his user page using tables https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Ian_Clark, which look a bit more ordered. Art pointed out that tables can take more space. Devon remarked that they do look nice. Raul mentioned the we might create the effect of a table with Css and not have some of the mark up overhead that can come with a table. Devon found that the tables are sortable. A second question is how much to we want to regulate the structure of the User pages. Consistency makes it much easier for users to find the information. It may be a case of educating curators to have an approach that is easy to access and encouraging consistency without enforcing it. Better organized information will increase the influence of the curator and perhaps this will be enough to generate consistency.
5. Devon asked if it was time to make stronger calls to action for the essay categorization since we now have a specific task and organization that seems to support it fairly well. Getting the larger group involved would be a good next step from what we have seen from the success of the first group that begun the process. Bob will build a stronger call to action in the text that announced the next video update on the forums.
6. Bob initiated a discussion about the success of array languages based on the podcast episode with Lib Gibson https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode35-lib-gibson, who follows the philosophy of Clay Christensen and the Innovators Dilemma. The array languages may have focussed too much on the powerful applications that are used in industry at the expense of widening the community that might find a very powerful calculator a compelling tool for math exploration. DragonBox https://dragonbox.com/products/algebra-12 was mentioned as an app that teaches algebra through simple interfaces that are create a physical sense of balancing equations in the user. Something similar might be used to encourage array style style thinking in the next generation. The J playground https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html2/ becomes a very interesting tool for widening the audience of the language.

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

If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is September 8th, 2022.