Generally, student response to this course has been enthusiastic. They seem to be relieved that they can learn computer science concepts and have hands on experience conducting experiments of various types without learning to write their own programs. Even though learning to program is not one of the course goals, many of the students find that they can write their own simple programs and seem to be pleased with this knowledge even though most of them will never find an occasion to program computers later in life. Since teaching programming is not the focus of this course, students tend to be casual rather than expert readers of the programs used in this course. J's readability could be improved for this type of user. For example, one nice feature of J is that one can use alternate spellings for words. This is useful when natural language readability is preferred over the more terse J spelling, for example, using the word or rather than +..
However, some words have an interaction side effect which preclude use of an alternate spelling such as define for 3 : 0.
Also, casual readers of the language seem to prefer arbitrary pronouns to name function arguments rather than the fixed pronouns x. and y..
An example of this style of expression can be found in the definitions of many of the functions given in Section 6. J users may find it preferable to have a definition syntax which would allow indirect specification of argument names a, b and cin in a more convenient form than ('a' ; 'b' ; 'cin') =. y..
Each offering of this course causes a few students to consider majoring in computer science. Hopefully some of those students will have learned enough J to realize the advantages of continued use of a language such as J.
The first few offerings of this course occurred before the acquisition of the laboratory equipment described in Section 5. The course was run in a makeshift lab of borrowed, out-of-date, Sun and Apple UNIX workstations. The lab workstations were under-powered for some of the experiments and presented different user interfaces at student workstations. Student response to laboratory experiments is much more positive with the HP workstations.