Subject: Collecting questions about J
From: richard.levine@canrem.com (Richard Levine)
Date: Wed, 17 May 95 05:53:00 -0500
Organization: CRS Online  (Toronto, Ontario)

This posting will interest primarily people currently learning J, or who
have had recent experience in trying to learn J, in the sense of
learning enough about the language to be able to use it in their field
of interest.

I am collecting questions (and answers!) on difficulties encountered in
learning J.  These may be difficulties you solved yourself, or
problems that are still unanswered.  For example, there may be
difficulties with particular concepts, such as conjunctions, or
difficulties with particular primitives, or questions about what order
to learn topics in the language, or questions about J "program style".
Or there may be questions about what error messages mean.

I am NOT concerned in this posting with difficulties (if any) with J
documentation, or difficulties (if any) with the system itself, e.g. how
to use session manager, or questions about bugs, although these are of
course valid topics.

For those interested in the subject of this posting, this
question was dealt with in a paper in APL93 (Eisenberg and
Peelle - Confessions of Two APL Educators Learning J).  Since then a
great many more people have started to learn J, so perhaps the question
is worth taking up again.

Message me privately if you like.  I will summarize the questions
(and the answers if I have them!) for comp.lang.apl as soon as I get
some replies.

---Richard L.
