Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-12-08

Report of Meeting 2022-12-08

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

1. Bob started by showing the new pages that he had developed that used Raul's method of putting the search bar above the content. It was agreed that the presentation was better and no reason could be found that this would interfere with page notifications. Bob also showed off the new front page that emphasized the promotional video more. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page3 Devon mentioned that there could be other links that might be put up on the main page. Bob had suggested that one of the things that he had thought about adding was wiki hints that explain that structure of the wiki and also how to get involved.
2. This led into a discussion about the structure of the wiki. Devon mentioned that a good search can alleviate some of the navigation issues and Bob showed an outline of the wiki based on the page map of the wiki. He planned to update the page map with regard to the new structure with added pages such as a beginners introduction to NuVoc. Raul suggested verbs only explained up to rank one approach. Art suggested that there is a beginner's NuVoc page that might be useful for this content. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Devon_McCormick/MinimalBeginningJ Devon mentioned that the community page is useful and that the forums should also be promoted on the newcomers page and mentioned that there could be cover pages in the newcomer's area to give a gentle introduction to the community areas for newcomers.
3. This led into a discussion about what would a developers page look like. Devon suggested that developers might use information about how to access C programs and DLL's. Bob also mentioned Apter trees https://github.com/tlack/atree as a way to give would be developers a boost if they were trying to develop tree algorithms using arrays. Devon had mentioned that had done similar essays about trees and these would be very useful to developers as well. Raul suggested a tutorial that might start with a looping approach in J that could be transformed into more array type thinking that might go several iterations before finding an elegant solution. This led Raul to talk about including information about special code and bottlenecks that might occur in the language. Bob mentioned the JPM - J Performance Manager and Devon was the only one who had used it and found it very good. Also, he mentioned that it looks a lot like what Sharp APL had 30 years ago. Bob mentioned the purpose of a developers page would be to make the language more friendly to developers who might consider working with the language. Devon thought that J for C programmers provides a good style of approach and that could be developed into how J can accommodate approaches that other languages might take.
4. Other constituencies might be managers who wanted to know about J. The more general question of 'Should I Use J' that could be aimed at a general audience and may be more appropriate on the main page. Another candidate for the main page may be a notice board that would replace the news page. A notice board could be used for announcements and would not require the amount of curation that a news page requires.
5. Bob then showed a script that he was working on to make it easier to create templates for wiki pages and the navigation bars. It is a form in jQt that allows the user to make choices of which links and format to put into the wiki page. This should make the transition to the new wiki easier to accomplish.

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 24:00 (UTC) Next meeting is December 15th, 2022.