Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-12-29

Report of Meeting 2022-12-29

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

1. Raul began by showing an APL https://janiczek.github.io/tryapl-elm/ doc that could be a model to allow for roll over of characters and information that may provide an easy way for users to be able to interact with the language as they learn it. Devon mentioned that the groupings of the different functions were useful for understanding as well. Bob said that the last step that he sees for the J playground is that it gets a permanent link and then links could start to be created for examples in NuVoc that could be useful for newcomers.
2. There was discussion about a forum post of a newcomer and that the fact that although many different backgrounds for newcomers to the language there would be some common traits that might be worth considering as the wiki is built out. This lead into a discussion of what a similar structure would look like for developers. There might be a need to be able to show potential developers that there are bridges to other languages, since many potential developers may be interested in using tools from other languages such as Python. Py'nAPL was mentioned as a bridge to Dyalog APL. https://github.com/Dyalog/pynapl
3. Brainstorming areas that we think that developers would like to access, we came up the fact that many of the essays in J provide useful information at a developer level. Raul pointed out that there are a wide range of developers and tha should be taken into account. Bob used the example that it would be good to have interoperability with other languages. Raul pointed out that often that sort of interoperability requires a champion to develop. Bob felt that it is more important to have sections of the wiki that provide a place for those type of essays to exist because that would promote more of those interoperability essays. Other areas might be the existing graphics and plot areas of the language. Devon is looking at data structures that many languages use, but may not be as useful in J. One of the areas that Devon is interested in is how hash tables would be used in J. The explanation may have two approaches. One may be a discussion that shows why a data structure may not be necessary in J to get the required functionality and the second could be an explanation of how the same sort of functionality can be achieved with J's tools. It was pointed out that hash table are over hyped in college courses, but may not be as useful in reality. Bob talked about the way that Henry Rich's J for C programmers approaches the concept of loops and the ways that J is able to use other techniques to get the same results that would require loops in other languages. This might be done for a number of other data structures.
4. The goal for the wiki structure for developers may be to provide a boost that allows developers to become effective more quickly. Bob used the example of Apter Trees that can simulate the tree data structure and leverage the power of array languages. Without the explanation of these type of techniques a developer may leave language because they do not know how to create the foundation that their applications may require. Raul pointed out that there are a variety of ways to use these data structures and that in order to be useful the information may need to create a number of examples that cover the different ways that the data structure may be used. From a recent ArrayCast episode, guest John Earnest mentioned that a lot of his work involved extending the array languages into multimedia. J was mentioned as a language that has a lot of existing hooks, but these have not been developed in a way that makes it easy for beginners to use. Extending the use of the language to these different domains may be a good way to increase the popularity of the language.
5. Bob then outlined a plan to introduce the new navigation to the wiki during the month of January and use the style of the prototype wiki https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page to start to organize the content of the existing wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page .

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