[Edu-sig] still admiring J

[kirby urner]

Greetings edu-siggers!

Way back in the archives you'll find me extolling a language known as J, by
Kenneth Iverson, his son Eric, and Roger Hui. I never met any of these guys
in person, but knew of Iverson through APL, which I discovered at
Princeton, and fell in love with.  Iverson helped me squish some typos in
my Jiving with J.[1]

What I admire about J, as about R and Python via Numpy, is the inclusion of
an n-Dimensional Block (array, addressable memory with multiple axes), as a
language native, a core star.  J reads like a right-to-left pipeline with
an nD Block going through it.  I guess we'd need to call that a Functional
Programming language right?

As the former high school math teacher (long ago -- though I'm still in the
schools, as recently as today in fact, as an after school Python
instructor), I still chafe at the fact that we don't dive in with these
tools at that age level, except in rare cases, and instead insist on
students buying all those TIs year after year.  But that's me the broken
record.

For those schools that break out, charter or public (nevermind, how they
talk in the US makes noooo sense), there's a world of wonderful technology
to explore, while learning the math that matters.  y = mx + b.  Turn m over
for w, and b is for bias.[2]

Kirby

[1]  http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/Jlang.html

[2]
https://www.google.com/search?q=mcdonalds+upside+down+w&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch
(recent meme)
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