Wiki/Report of Meeting 2024-07-18

Report of Meeting 2024-07-18

Present: Skip Cave, Raul Miller and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available below on this wiki page.

1) Bob initiated a discussion about the ways that talk pages can be used to discuss changes to the wiki. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Talk:Essays/Tree_Display Raul points out Recent Changes https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?hidebots=1&limit=250&days=30&enhanced=1&urlversion=2 in the sidebar will show up, if people are checking it. Also, the Recent Pages get replaced as more pages are changed which means that this method will not be useful over time. Raul also points out that it can take years for some pages on Rosetta Code to reach a decision through conversation. Bob is concerned that this does not encourage people to to update information and create pages when there is limited response. Bob wondered if the forums might be used to amplify the changes and suggestions since they are more closely monitored. Skip suggested that the forum post could include a link to the talk page which Bob agreed is a good approach. Perhaps, a synopsis of the proposal on the forum with a link to the talk page with more details. Bob may put together a post on the forums as well as that information on the Contributing to the Wiki page. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Contributing_to_the_J_Wiki_W.2 Raul points out that if it creates too much traffic on the forum that the process can be rolled back to just the talk pages when there is more awareness of the talk page method.

2) Bob reported that he and Ed Gottsman had met with Jan Jacobs, who is doing a quantitative analysis of the wiki information and appropriate categorization. Currently, the information that Jan is looking for is the appropriate level of fan-out for the different category levels. Raul feels that the ordering numbers on the category pages that make up the category tree are a mystery to most people and may not encourage participation. Bob replied that without the coding system anyone can create a category that is part of the 'word cloud' categories. The next level is the categories that are part of the category trees which are given suffix codes to create a hierarchy. Changes to these pages would have to be done with the Wiki group because it affects the category structure. Raul wondered how people would know if the category that they are proposing is not already covered. Bob said that he would include the current category list https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Category_Tree_Cut_and_Paste with the Contributing to the Wiki page along with an explanation of the category tree. If people really want to curate the wiki in this way, they would need this information and it should be in the wiki. It would be great if people wanted to take on this job of curation, since more perspectives result in better categorization.

3) Raul had suggested a blog post of Hillel Wayne https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/the-problem-with-apls/ and his discussion of discoverability of the functionality of the J language. Hillel knows the language, but still found it difficult to find the specific primitives that might solve the problems that he is trying to solve. Raul thinks that this should be kept in mind when creating pages and how those pages might be linked to make the information more accessible. Skip had brought this up in the past and gave the example of a traditional programmer trying to find out about looping in J, without knowing about Fold or the Power conjunction. Skip felt that some sort of a thesaurus may be needed that would cover a wider range of terminology used in other languages that would direct the user to the appropriate part of J. Skip mentioned that this sort of problem had been solved by banks using decision trees that would direct the caller to the solution based on thousands of hours of customer calls. AI is something that is now replacing that and may be the way in the future, using only the J information for the specialized corpus. Raul suggested that a paragraph or two in an essay that covers the common programming structures may be useful. Raul wondered about including links to the ArrayCast podcast transcripts.. Bob felt that the information density of the podcast is not all that high for someone looking for information. Skip said that he has directed people who see his Quora solutions towards the J Playground and some have followed up and learned J. Bob also felt that the Developers branch of the tree, which is currently dormant, would be natural place that this type of information would be found. Skip talked about problems that he had with keeping his library up to date through new versions. Bob suggested that this can be done with configuration files and this kind of information would be appropriate for the Developer section as well.

4) We wrapped up with a discussion of the different professions and how they have different paradigms for understanding the same physical properties. An example was electricity and the fact that engineers, chemists and physicists all look at electrical properties with differing tools that fit their point of view.

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 J forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC).

Transcript

And I think I started off the agenda with a question about the info pages.

As Doug Manella had wanted to do something I think previously I'm trying to think of Cameron Chandoke I think it was.

They've both been using info pages to sort of sketch out what they want to do.

And I'm not sure that's the best way to engage the community, but thoughts on that.

Looking at the temperature still, it was 99 yesterday.

You read the question for me since I wasn't paying. Yes, sure.

Things that they'd like to contribute, but rather than just putting a page in there using a talk page to do it, which I think is appropriate.

Actually a good way to do it, but I'm not sure it gets community engagement.

So any thoughts, is it hard, it's hard to the, the, the thing, I guess there's the recent changes those do show up in the recent changes page right.

But you have to be looking there, and we don't really have a.

It's not like a fee it's, it's a very small audience. Yeah.

And I guess that's a real issue is we a small community with with occasional activity.

It's enough to saturate a discord but for a wiki with all the hundreds of pages it's kind of

like the same as the same feel of engagement.

Yeah, I think if you're trying to propose something and you do that, and then you wait five or six days and there's been no response.

Yeah, if you wait to the recent pages thing only shows relatively recent I mean, as long as we have activity, everything gets shoved off of it, so it's got, you don't have, you know, for wiki for a single page it might be months before somebody

comes on and notices that thing on that page and since we don't have a.

There's nothing there to say top pages been updated since last time you visited or anything like that.

Yeah. And I just don't think that there's an audience in that area looking for that either, like that's even if there was a way of signaling it I don't think there's that much traffic going through that way.

And to me that's a that's a culture change if we want to do that. It's a pacing issue too. I mean, on Rosetta code. We use top pages, and sometimes it's years between you know conversation will take place and then several years later somebody will add something

to it and then some more years go by and somebody add to it again.

And that that's a larger community too.

So, it's, I mean you're, it depends on how you how you view it and what your expectations are.

Yeah, I guess I can put like in terms of that.

My goal is not to lose people who have suggested they want to make a contribution.

And my fear is that that if you leave that with no response, you will lose people.

It's, we should probably encourage them to propose changes on, you know, to add to pages, you know, add, add content to the page itself, and then have, you know, thoughts about how it might be integrated better or other alternatives on the top page, you know, either are in comments on the page itself but, since that has a similar effect for editors.

Do you think it's an option to take it off the wiki and put it on the forums.

Yes.

If, if it depends on depends on what it is that I mean, if it's if it's specifically wiki content. I don't know the forums are going to be all that much better.

But forms are good play if you want engagement forms are really the best place for that.

I mean, other than the discord.

Maybe in the forum.

You mentioned what you're doing and you put a link to the page.

Yeah, that way, that way they see something's happening they go see what you did.

Yeah, you could do that way or if they were doing it with a talk page that you're at so really good point you can put a link to the talk page, which isn't a content page it's like the back end of the content.

And you could have your whole proposal sitting there.

Yeah.

That's a good point.

And originally, well Doug Manila was one of the people that, yeah, I think he was trying to put something in about trees. I think that was his goal without those pages.

And you responded to it also I mean he got feedback that way.

So my suggestion was is put it in there that's I think that's appropriate.

Wait a couple days if you haven't seen anything post something on the forums.

But

I think.

I'm just wondering whether you post it first on the forums, put a link to the talk page let's skip suggesting so you give a essentially an abstract of what you're suggesting, and a link to details.

I think I don't want to flood the forums but I don't get the sense of the forums are being flooded right now.

Yeah, they're not.

And I think it's a better way especially when you're trying to float an idea to get it out to the wider community that's probably going to see it on the forums.

You know you, you can't say they weren't aware of it.

You know, they might not be if you're not following the forums but saying is if you're, if you're posting to the forum you're going to the place where the most likely chance for everybody to see it is.

Anyway, that was, that was the issue and, and

I think I'll give a little bit more thought but I think what I may end up doing is posting something to the forums.

Ask people if they you know the wikis there, you can contribute to it, you can sign up for it if you haven't already if you've signed up for it and you haven't used it for a while.

You're able to do that to add information.

And if you're not sure about things.

Put it on the talk page, post the forum.

Wait for a bit of feedback and if you don't get feedback, put it in there it's a wiki it can get reversed.

You know I'd rather encourage participation.

Doing the work to take things out, then, yeah, yeah. And if we roll back that might be, you know, you say, you know, if it's a problem we'll roll it back when we take the top page then and we can we can sort of through.

That's true. That's true. Yeah.

I may put that into a part of the contributing to the wiki page that I've got put up.

I could put that I could do essentially what I was talking about in the forum put it in the forum. And then for details check the contributing to the wiki page and you'll, there'll be information there that sort of outlines the steps you can take.

And see where that goes. But again, I don't, I don't want to lose people because it looks like we're not doing anything.

And it's just because, well not, we're not doing anything but that the eyes might not be on the area that you're doing things.

You know, I think if somebody's willing to contribute and do some work. I think it should be recognized as well.

I think that's about all I've got on that topic. I'll quickly.

Ed and I met with john Jacobs, who's been doing the.

What's the best way to.

He's essentially taking the creating this huge word word cloud of all the words in the wiki, and then winnowing it down to come up with what might be a quantitative foundation for categories.

And Ed and I had a good chat with him he got to the point where he wasn't sure about how we wanted what level of fan out we wanted.

And part of the challenge was is the way I've done the categories in the wiki.

There's one main category and there's a number of smaller categories. So in terms of a fan out it's kind of a weird thing because the fan out is variable across the wiki.

I think what he's going to do is he's going to try various fan outs and provide me with the different groupings that would would occur with it.

And then from there, we'll see where we go and what flexibility we have whether there is flexibility and taking different parts of the wiki and having different fan outs, different fan outs at different levels.

I mean, it's all experimental at this point. Right. One, one, one thing I'm thinking there about your, your, your category hierarchy.

Is the, the, there's, there's the label itself, which is, you know, it's a categorization thing, but on the right hand side of the label you have the, the ordering stuff, you know, and 17 or whatever.

And that is a mystery, which means that if somebody is going to label a page.

It's not, they aren't just going to say, Oh, this is arithmetic.

They're going to want to know, is this the right kind of arithmetic and how to, or, you know, if they want to add.

If it isn't, what do they need to do to make it right or if it is, you know, how do they need to either pick the right one or make a new one or they need to contact you, you know, how does, how does somebody think about putting categories on pages in this in this system.

Well, and that's an excellent question. There are two levels to it.

The first level is, if you just enclose it in square brackets with category in front of it.

You've created a category.

No, but using.

I mean, how does, how does one, how does a, especially a new page writer, decide what how to what how to categorize page, how to put categories on a page.

Well, and at that first level, where you can create any category you want it, that is completely flexible. So, it's, it's easy to do and there's not any restrictions you, you name it as you wish.

And the flip side of that which is not the positive side is that it's it's essentially becomes a word cloud.

It's, it's got not really part of the categorization structure you see on the in the hierarchy.

Now, the second level is a both are great points and probably should be addressed both in the contributions to the wiki. The second level, you do have to, and I should probably post a list of all the categories, you could create those yourself and to make

your own decision about what categories you want to put them in.

If you wanted to create new categories, you'd have to approach somebody with the wiki because that will actually affect Ed structure for his wiki viewer.

If we start moving that hierarchy around he can do it he can accommodate it.

But when we do it, it will make a change to his, his, he's basing his map his display on the categories.

So adding a few categories is just going to change a few entries to the display. If we were to enter a lot of categories or radically change it, that could actually affect how his display shows up.

I think I think you left out something here, which is before a person would want to create a new category, they would, they would want to understand close matches and the existing system to decide whether or not those were good enough for their purposes, and not sure

how they would navigate that part.

Well, I think probably what I should do is part of that contributing to the wiki page.

I've got a list of all the categories.

And so, if nothing else that would give you a sense of the hierarchy, and the naming that's going on.

I'm not tied to that. And that's part of the work we're doing with young is I, if, if

the categorization is one person's run through. And I can unabashedly say it's not as good as it could be.

If it had been done with a number of people, or quite possibly in fact, quite probably somebody else could have done a better job than I did.

And so I'm not married to those categories. The only downside is, is you end up with extra category pages.

You can still take them out of the whole tree but then you're starting to affect all those links and stuff like that. So, that is the downside of it.

But having having categories change, or even renaming categories.

Well the renaming categories you'd have probably have the forward categories and I'm not sure how well that would work.

But

the idea is as long as you're willing to entertain extra categories floating around.

You can restructure the tree it's a bit of work to do it.

Adding categories is actually easier than anything else.

At any level that's part of the numbering system there are gaps in the numbers, so that you can enter in between things all the way through.

So if you decide that you want a subcategory, that's easy to do. If you want to actually insert in between you can do that as well.

That requires visualizing the tree.

Yes, sequence. Well, and that's a whole process of education.

That would be fantastic. But I think that's the level at which a person would be that interested in the categories or adding or subtracting categories.

I would welcome that.

And as such, I should probably put some more documentation about how that works. So if somebody had that interest they're not immediately going to wander by without even tweaking their interest.

And I think the other topic that I think you had suggested or you pointed me towards.

Hello wings.

And I've included that in the agenda.

Do you want to speak to what you saw on that blog post.

I should probably. I just thought it was interesting that he was talking about the URL.

We did it on the discord didn't I didn't email it.

Let me see if I've got it. I might have it in hand.

It's the same problem that we we've got with, you know, the dictionary of, of, of, of, how do you search it.

It's just, he was talking about discoverability though which is a slightly different perspective on that.

And he was, he was doing an essay. I kind of understand the language and I understand other languages but I find my spokes, you know, he finds himself spending a lot of time trying to figure out where is, you know, what's relevant to what he's trying to do.

And this is that post right. Yep.

And that seems like the sort of thing that the sort of the sort of perspective that you want to have when when thinking about the wiki when you're thinking about adding to structure writing to its content is how can you make.

We make more discoverable and that's that's not a, you know, flip a switch and it's done that's more of a something to keep in mind whenever you're updating the page is how can you make you know how can you cross link it how can you expose search engines how can you hide to the right primitives.

The documentation period was that kind of stuff.

And the thing that I guess I value.

Yeah.

I think this.

No, I was gonna actually refer to you skip because you've you've asked this question in the past.

Yeah, well that.

Yeah, what I whenever I come in to try to find stuff.

My biggest hurdle is how to describe it because, you know, there are certain programming terms that that are used in other languages that Jay doesn't use as often, you know, like looping is almost, I mean, it's whole different thing it's a whole different thing and J looping compared to, to what most for train programmers would call looping let's put it that way.

And the same kind of thing with, you know,

all the different names for till the dot, you know, you know, reduction or the minimum, you know, remove all this is what I can one way I put it, you know, so you get a lot of ways and unfortunately, if you don't pick the right way you don't find the answer.

And that's the problem across you have a.

That's problem with Microsoft documentation to for example.

Right, right. Well, it's almost like you need a Sarah.

Right.

You need this RS and then you have this, you know, a word, and you have all the other possible meanings or phrases that can mean the same thing.

And then you kind of, you know, once you type in one of those phrases or words, then, then a single list of links pops up says, Okay, here's the, you know, here are all the things that could be what you're asking about, which is maybe not the most, the most optimum but it's, but it's, you know, probably as good as you're going to get.

You know, it's just because, because the English language is, is highly flexible, and it's redundant in many ways you can have lots of ways to say the same thing.

And I think that's, that's the struggle when somebody's coming I mean I have a new have a programming problem like the other day I was trying to figure out how to box horizontally and I posted it on the web and on the forum and got the perfect answer, you know, but I was able to describe it.

You know, I have a bunch of stuff that I've listed, you know, vertically and I want to box the horizontal elements or unbox the horizontal elements that is actually part of it.

So you have a column with three boxes across and hundred boxes, you know, tall. How do you unbox the row, each row, you know, yeah, and put them all together.

Yeah, man I was it wasn't obvious but I once I saw the solution that Oh, okay, that makes perfect sense.

You know, so that I guess that to me, of course I have my background is all about speech recognition and natural language understanding.

So that's, you know, that's the problem I run into all the time people call, like I say people call into the bank, they say how many coins are in my piggy bank, how much money I got, you know, what's my balance.

Those are all, those are all definitions of the same thing right.

Yeah.

Same exact question.

So I think actually part of your example is really perfect because it actually comes into what I think is in a way, a solution to this and what that is is Ed's J viewer has access to all the words in all the forums, up to this New Year's this year.

And because of that, if a question has been asked in the forum, and people happen to use a word that would fit with what you had, you may find it in there through that viewer.

If you don't have the viewer, it's, it would just be way too much work for you to try and figure out where it might be, but with the viewer I think you got something on your side that can actually do a search of all those words, and may pull up something, not saying it's your first or your second it's not ranked.

But it might be a way into getting that kind of.

You might want to give a, you might want to design a compartmentalized AI, you know, it's just for J, it's trained on all the J, you know, all the J nomenclature, that's it, you know, you don't, you don't want generalized stuff, you just want J stuff in there, although it might, you know, it might be smart to have some programming languages in there.

But if you could relate them, you know, but if you can't, if they can't relate to J nomenclature, then you're back to the same problem again.

But, you know, I know enough about the, about the AI mechanisms to say, yeah, you might be able to, by looking at word frequency, you know, just word frequencies, which is basically what they do.

You know, you might be able to say, well, whenever this, these two words are together, that's pretty, that falls in the same kind of, same kind of probability as when these two words fall together.

Same, same, talking about the same stuff. I don't know, I mean, it seems to be fairly successful, but that means, you know, a whole, you know, you basically have to take the whole J compendium of text and do a, you know, do a limited, you know, machine learning on that to get the word, the word probabilities and try to get,

I don't know how, I don't know how well it would work to get those.

I think you'd have to try and build it on an existing model. I don't think there's enough, there's enough words in the J knowledge bank to be able to provide.

How do you measure it?

But you might be able to add on top.

That's true, that's true.

If you add it on top, but you only point to results that are in J, right? So you may have lots of words, but you can make a cloud of words that from all programming or the programming world that then point down to a particular J concept.

That'd be cool.

Yeah.

That would be exactly what you want.

I don't know how you get the AI to do that. Exactly. I'm not that expert at it. I'm just, I use it a little bit, but I don't know. I don't understand the underlying mechanisms enough other than just word probabilities.

Yeah, I think it would take somebody who's got probably a deeper understanding, but I, I, well, I think to some extent it would be experimental, but I'm sure that in cases where you've got, as you're dealing with banks, that they use specific areas of information that their large language model is adjacent to, so that you can maintain security.

And you know, you're not going to have it hallucinate and start grabbing other people's bank records.

You'll stay.

Well, actually, now what we used to do in the banking world is we would, we would take a, we would record, and I think Raoul remembers this, we recorded millions of transcriptions of people calling into the bank.

And then we categorize those into the things that they wanted. Right. And, and that would turn out to be not very many in the case of the bank, there's only 10 or 15 things. And it's only usually one or two things like count balance and transfer money and, you know, a couple of other ones.

And so, and you can pretty much after a while, you can find all the ways they ask for balance. Right. Because you just go through, look at all, you know, and, and, and whenever they end up with the count balance and say, okay, that's what they wanted.

You can go back and say, well, okay, all these phrases, whatever they said, that means account balance. Right. And so something like that for Jay, you know, just all the phrases, for example, you know, the tilde dot, you know, well, remove duplicates.

Okay. Get rid of other, find one of each kind, you know, or, you know, or histogram, but, you know, that close to that kind of thing. And, and if you're able to do that, you'd get, you'd get, you know, people could type in or speak a question or type in a question, at least get a narrowed down places to look,

which would be a big view gel.

Have you done anything with the Jay viewer?

Not recently. I've been, I have, I have my Jay, and I do my, I continue to do my exercise in online, you know, doing the stuff on social media, math problems, you know, but I, my Jay works.

I already know is rare that I actually have to go look something up, you know, now. So I, I'm, if I, if I'm having a question, most of the time, I just go to the Jay vocabulary. And I think this is what this, yeah, that's what it does. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, no.

It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not quite the same thing as somebody coming in, you know, from another programming environment or from no programming involved at all, who wants to do something.

And so that the question they have, you know, is going to be described in a way that probably doesn't have any Jay words in it. If you know what I'm saying. And that's the problem. That seems to be the problem. You have to translate, you know, general concept to Jay word or Jay function. Right.

And that's the whole, the whole focus general concept to Jay, to Jay, you know, function.

Maybe what that means is, is a paragraph or two.

Just listing, you know, describing how other related technical fields might refer to these concepts.

Yep.

That's a good idea. That probably works.

And it's a little bit harder in the new box. There's so many linked fields, but for essays and stuff like that, I think it should work.

I mean, you can add to it, I guess.

You go to places like the, the array cast, you know, or, or one of the, the array language groups, you know, and just pick concepts out of there and try to plug them into Jay.

That's what we got to do. That's what we got to convince Ed to do is, is link the podcast into the Jay viewer.

I don't think that's a high density of content there.

Well, yeah, but the transcripts are at least searchable, right?

Oh yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. No, they're searchable.

I'd be happy to let them have the transcripts if that's useful to them, but I don't.

Podcasting is an interesting way to attract and to engage people, but I don't think it's the best way to convey information.

Yeah.

We've got the NYCG.

Go ahead.

Oh, the, the Derek, the, the New York Jay users group. We've got those NYC jug stuff.

Oh, for Devin. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's, that's kind of similar in character to podcasts. It's maybe a little bit more.

I think he's a bit more focused and I think he also has continuity across meetings as well.

I think there's, there's definitely more information and in New York jug meetings than there is in the podcast.

And I don't mind, you know, it's an interesting thing to consider the podcast, but it's almost like that would be like establishing a mood.

If you're interested in something, it might be something to listen to.

And the reason I was thinking that is if to actually listen to the podcast, you know, you might be going for a hundred hours.

Yeah.

And, and if you, if you're trying to, if you're trying to focus on a topic and there's like two podcasts on that, you're probably going to want to search it rather than to listen to all a hundred hours.

I've said that to people. That's why we, one of the big reasons we do transcript one is accessibility.

But the other is people will search them. I searched them for when things were mentioned and to be able to pull things out.

When I, when I put stuff up on Quora, I've, I've had quite a few people say, oh, Jay's very interesting.

How do you, where do you find out about Jay? Of course, I have a little thing link down there.

Just go here and find out about Jay. In fact, I've done several of them where I say, if you want to try this out, here's the, here's the browser based Jay, you know, plug this stuff in there and watch what happens, you know.

And I've got several people enough interested. I think they've gone off and learned someday, you know, and that, and that's, that's the kind of, because that, that particular area in Quora, which is math problems, has the guys that are really into programming of all kind of weird language, all kind of languages in there.

And they, they argue about, you know, I'll post something in Jay and some people try to post something that's even shorter, you know, and most of the time they don't do it because I usually get it as short as I want.

But, but that's, it's usually pretty impressive. People say, man, how'd you do that in one line? I say, well, that's the way Jay is built. That's what it's supposed to do.

Yeah, yeah.

The other thing that struck me from that blog post is to me, a lot of what he was talking about and to some extent what you're talking about skip is what I was thinking of as the developers part of the tree, which I haven't actually put up yet we kind of shut it down and focused on reference.

But the developers area I would say, would be the area where there would be more applications and how to do things and how to address particular issues, things like input and output, and sort of the general things that if you're trying to interface with other languages.

I think that would be the way to put where to put that.

I'd say files how to read file some other languages, things like that.

Programming styles.

How to use, you know, if you want to do object oriented what's the appropriate way to do it.

Right. It's like the changes Henry's recently put in with the locales. That would be a section to explain what's going on there.

But at this point I haven't expanded that just because I want to get the reference up and going and I think the references sort of the, the main part of the wiki I see being used, and then the developer might take people to come in and start adding more stuff to it.

Yeah, when I, when I go in, most of what I've been doing is just running my test code for I am there, but occasionally well for a while I was going out and using the, the, you know, the, the reference but something got broken and I haven't fixed it I haven't figured out what's going on now because whenever I up the grade.

J. I lose my all my utility verbs and so I have to go load all those in and then, and then I, you know, and then I have to make sure I got the, the, the references back in there and I haven't got them back in the last time so I got to, got to work on that I may have to have one of you guys help me figure out what's what happened to my, because my last j doesn't have it again I think I lost it something so I got to fix that.

Well, given whether or not you can power, you got compel a bit compatibility between versions.

You can copy your old user to the new user has to the new one and then you'll have all the old stuff there. Now it might not be compatible with the new version.

Yeah, most of the I've usually cleaned it up so it's pretty much I, I usually just copy it, but I've got a, I guess I just need to completely read, get the latest version, bring it up and then, you know, make sure it all works and then copy in my user files I mean, you know, that's the, that's what I got to do I haven't.

I'm trying to upgrade and that's, you know, at some point, you just have to stop and, you know, start the new version, basically and I haven't done that.

But I'm not sure I don't know whether you know Raleigh is there a way to import old user files into other than just dragging and copying old user files into it into J.

Yeah, let's know it was so for instance with with J you've got your J system, you know your 9.5 J 9.5 or whatever. And then you'll have J 9.5 hyphen user.

All right, where are your files are kept right.

I everything into there I have to do that. So,

I actually leave the old files on my old user. I keep old versions of J around so I can test stuff out because you know there's changes. And I leave my old old user files in the old system I don't copy and forward, except for when I find a use for them because I tend to keep everything kind of throw it in a closet type approach.

So, if for me it's an opportunity to, you know, neglect the old closet and just bring over the new stuff it's, it's a lot of it's not particularly interesting, or not, not that it's not interesting it says, I don't, you know, I'm off doing something else now.

But I have a bunch of utilities that I use all the time, things like you know range limit and separate, you know, separate digits and I'd rather than use the actual J code I have a, you know, RL for range limit rather than have.

Yeah, I think copying it forward is the right way to do there. That's what I do when I do have something that I want to bring forward is I make a copy of it in the new in the new.

Yeah, new J instance.

I have about, I don't know how many dozens of, you know, these, these little utility verbs that I use just to keep the, the, the, the sentences fairly short so they're making, you know, they don't, I can describe what's going on, and I can give them copies of the utility verbs at the end, but, you know, I wanted to show them how it can be very, very concise to do fairly complex things, you know, and it only takes a year, it only takes a couple of years.

For example, the two, you know, from 10 to 20 for example, you can do that with an I dot and some extra pluses and things like that but it's just easy to say, give me all the numbers from 10 to 20 you know and and and it makes it reads better from a, you know, from a sample.

I remember that being a stumbling block for me when I was trying to do decor posts like I couldn't make it work until I could find the definition. I know the viewer, we now we have that page now in the viewers so that I can go and look this stuff up but at one point that was a that was a problem for me.

Yeah, that was my. Those are things that I you know I remember remembering, you know, how to do that. I remember what I knew what I thought could do but I gotta add front and add to the end you know and and I gotta make sure they get the right number.

It was just so easier to say 10 to 20.

So,

the other solution might be to well there are two solutions I can think of. You've imported into your configuration file so you can load everything at that point. And if that's brought over.

Or if you don't use configuration file. I think the other way to do it is to do with a project.

So that you work within a project, and the project has all the working stuff in it. You just load the project there.

I just like to have. I like to load all those in first, whenever I load j I like to have all the all that all my utilities in there because that that way I don't have to remember to have some config file.

Okay. Okay. So the thing in the config file is you just need to know locations of the files you want to bring in.

And then to move them. It'll go pick those up and bring them across and as long as they stay where they are, they'll have to have a custom custom config file that is all, but I haven't.

Yeah, so I had to pick up the config file.

Either that or to load the, the, you know, the utility files one or two. Okay.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe everybody has a config file. It's just an empty thing if you don't do anything with it.

Oh, I see. Okay.

As soon as you define one it'll go there first and load what you want, and then continue. Okay, so if I upgrade it goes, it uses the config file to help upgrade that right.

It's, I think, config file is part of the startup of the program.

If you do an install, and you don't, and you don't, it gives you a config file right then and there. And so every time you do a install a fresh version you get a fresh config file but you can copy your config file forward.

Okay, so I have to either copy the config file or copy the utility file. Okay.

I mean you can do both if you wanted but it depends what you're, what, what, how much of it's important to you.

Well, yeah, the main thing, most of the time I just want, I want all the utilities to be defaulted. Yeah, I want them there because I use them all the time.

So it's like part of the language for me.

I just because I, I, I, I, so that's, but that's all right I think I figured that out. I'll look at the config file and figure out if I can do it that way.

But I've got I've got to redo my day anyway I mean I've got to load the latest one that I've been falling behind and then I got to, I want to see the new, you know, discover all the new documents stuff.

So,

yeah I think this kind of these kind of topics would be the natural thing I would think would fit into a developers category on the, in the wiki.

Right, those kind of people would come up with different ways of doing this and you'd have a chance of looking at different pages and seeing picking choosing which ways you'd like to do it.

Right, right, right, right, right.

You know, if I come up with a simple new not mnemonic like to or, you know, RL for run for range limit.

And those kind of things, you know, and some things are just primitives like brace colon, left brace colon, the end I want the end one you know, and so those kind of things I don't even need it.

Pretty poor but some of the things that require, you know, more code or J code it's easier to make a remedy, I mean to make a utility.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well that's the reason there's each, you know, it's not to spell it out but still each tells you what you want to do with it. Yeah, each or even I just use EA makes it shorter yet, because I to me I remember.

But you're right. I could just type that.

The thing you fall into with that is, if it's too customized to you.

As well, no, nobody else can use it. The other thing is, you happen to hop on somebody else's computer.

They don't have that stuff. And, and now you're gonna have to be, you know, yeah.

Exactly. Interesting, interesting similarity. I'm a drummer right playing bands. And, and if you learn the drums left handed. You can't sit in today but it's computer, anybody's band because the drums are backwards.

So you everybody want you have to learn right handed drumming.

If you want to sit in other people's bands, that's exactly.

And even at that if they've got their kit set up differently it's going to be a little bit different still. But at least, because the thing that's most important is your feet, your feet, you have a bass drum on the right pedal and I had on the left pedal right.

And if those are switched.

I drove a standard van in, in the UK.

And thank goodness they keep the foot pedals the right way around.

Oh, okay. It's when I hopped in I thought oh man if they reverse this I am screwed.

They don't your left.

Yeah, okay that's good. Yeah, it is good.

I don't think you could drive it otherwise.

I never drove the standard in Europe so I'm lucky.

I have a bug fix for your to verb.

I should probably email it to you.

Yeah, okay.

I'll email it to you.

Okay, well I, I didn't know I had a bug because I've been using two for a long time and a problem maybe, maybe do 15 to 10. It goes from 18 to 15.

Oh, okay. Oh, you're going down yeah I didn't never I hardly ever tried thought about going backwards okay, you're right, I need to fix it.

I'll replace that in my utility bag.

And because that is just easier than using. I dot something with pluses, add this 10 on the front and make sure you get subtracted off the map around the distance.

Too much math in my head.

I think in one of the libraries since there is steps function or something that you can.

Yeah, that's totally different though that because that's, that's giving the gaps in between isn't it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

To verb to verb I use that all the time. I mean for all kind of stuff and whenever I need a string of numbers on this one to that one.

Now, obvious.

Okay.

So I'll say when I want to go down I just put a reverse on the front of it so

that's good.

Anyway, that's about all I had anything else anybody else wants to bring up.

I mean the stuff I should I promise myself I do that I haven't done yet.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna get back on and get the latest J and see if I can get it all set up again because I'm getting I've fallen behind on the on all the, the documentals documentation stuff so I gotta get that updated again I'm gonna do that.

Well, and the latest is, you know, the latest technically is the beta but honestly if you if you're at 9.5.

That's the working version right now. Okay, okay, I do have 9.5. For some reason it didn't something happened to it I think I've promised it up I gotta check and find out what's going on because I tried to load it just a little bit ago and it was like, Nope, it's not loading.

Yeah, good. 9.6 is the beta but it won't be consistent it'll change a little bit.

Well I mean, I do have a lot of stuff on my laptop my laptop working right yes I'm on my desktop right now and it's been a while since I've gotten on some some happened to it.

Okay. Very interesting. Yeah, I think I don't know I'll try to think some more about how to do this. The whole issue of semantics and how to how to get what people say translated into what Jay does.

Yeah, that's it. That's a.

Yeah, and you've got a terminology is one level but the other thing you've got working against you if you're talking to somebody who's with one of the other type of procedural languages, you're crossing a paradigm so they don't even look at the problem the same way you do.

Right, right. And some of that's obnoxious, some of that's, I mean, it's just, just for, you know, a person style. Some of that is, is, is, is much is much deeper though.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

Focus.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would guess in that case, a paradigm, you're looking at it from a different view so you have a different way of organizing it.

And you have different equations talking about some of the same thing because I mean like, take batteries, you know, from a chemical point of view a battery is is this thing that you put out a large amount of current.

You know, some number of amp hours or million hours or whatever, whereas from a physics point of view they're talking more focused on the voltage and the physics perspective on the on the actual underlying phenomena is more what you mean it's it's the same phenomena but but the, the equations will describe static electricity, more than just batteries because it's, you know, it's, it's.

Oh yeah, where they've approached it.

Where's, where's.

He's been working combining equations and it's one big equation that that that deals with, with the whole area but it's just different area of focus, you know,

question about whether that generalization is needed because both groups would be happy viewing it the way they are.

Well, I mean, neither ones and if you're engineering you might, you might find it useful.

Especially if you're trying to do something new with batteries, but if you're not designing batteries you just go by battery.

I'm an engineer, so as an engineer, I just want to know how many watt hours I got in that battery before it quits, you know, and, and, and, you know, and so, and that's when I got my solar panels and my batteries on my house, you know, I was like okay can I run my air conditioner all night, you know, with the power off, okay, probably can't, I'm gonna get two batteries, right.

So, okay, well it's been great chatting, and thank you for the input and the feedback and everything and, and participation.

Great to see you skip it's been a while.

Yeah, I've been a while I've been been trying to get back and come back and I finally set myself alarm today okay I want to go. I'm going to go to this meeting, no matter what.

It's good to see you. I appreciate it. Yeah, glad you're doing well.

Good to see you. Yeah, great. Thanks. Bye bye.

Bye.