J at Greenock

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 44

On the 1st of March, Donald McIntyre gave the latest of his justly acclaimed workshops at the IBM plant education centre in Greenock. The emphasis from the start was on the various forms of function composition about which more appears elsewhere in these pages. Version 7 of J was used, in which caps ([:) used in a fork provides an alternative to @.

Donald has now assembled a vast library of scripts which illustrate the many facets of J. These he selects with considerable flair and enthusiasm to construct individual sessions based on single problems, each of which highlights a generous variety of what most needs to be understood by the beginner. Construction of similarity matrices and of Markov chains are two such examples.

Donald also described the evolution and history of J, and the astounding capacity of the J interpreter to produce interesting results beyond what even its designer and author conceived — a new interpretation perhaps of artificial intelligence.