Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
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From: rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell)
Subject: Re: spoke to Ken Iverson about J written material
In-Reply-To: Richard J. Gaylord's message of Thu, 15 Oct 1992 08:50:14 GMT
Message-ID: <ROCKWELL.92Oct16221311@socrates.umd.edu>
Sender: rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell)
Organization: Traveller
References: <Bw3r7M.9MJ@news.cso.uiuc.edu> <Bw5n7s.19x@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1992 03:13:11 GMT
Lines: 56

Richard J. Gaylord:
. ... I told whoever answered the phone that i had tried to learn J
. last year but was quite unsuccessful and i found the written
. material accompanying the program to be completely unhelpful to me
. but I was trying again since I found Smillie's article on Statistics
. and J to be totally fascinating.
.
. Well, i guess i shouldn't have said the written material was unhelpful
. since it turned out that i was speaking to Ken Iverson, the creator of
. APL and J. 

An interesting question occurs to me: which written material had you
tried to use?  If you were working with status.doc, and j.hlp, and the
like, you are completely correct -- this material is inadequate.  If
you're talking about Ken Iverson's books, I think it's fairly likely
that you've not gone through all the examples, or perhaps not even all
the books.

It's true, these books are fairly slow going, the first time around,
and some of the earlier editions had some typos in them [which can be
very confusing].  But this is very much in line with the "poetic"
aspect of the language -- it takes a certain amount of effort to
appreciate it, but there are people find it an incredibly expressive
language, once they've come to know it.

But without a transcript of your conversation, it will be difficult to
ascertain exactly what was said, and on what points [if any] the
conversation should have gone differently.

. he explained at great (endless) length how well wriiten the material
. was and how anyone who couldn't understand it just doesn't know how
. to learn a programming language or how to learn math for that
. matter.

Considering how easily I've seen someone with barely a high-school
education pick up some of this stuff, I think he might have a point.
Then again, maybe you were not talking about the same material.

Also, note that he's not getting paid any more for this than you are.
So it is, perhaps, fair to say that he is the customer as much as you
are.  And, he's no more a sales droid than you are.  Though I can
understand if you wish that he had been.

.    i expect to be told encouraging words like " well, some people,
.    because of the way they approach the textual material and because
.    of their particular approach to learning other programming
.    languages find it difficult to shift mental gears as is needed to
.    learn J.. however, if they keep at it (and maybe use the net
.    group to help them resolve their questions) they are inevitably
.    rewarded by having mastered an extremely powerful and productive
.    language"

There is some truth to this.

-- 
Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell                   <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>
