A deep dive into APL

Your definition is simply not usable. By this definition, a bootloader is an OS, the BIOS is an OS, etc. All it needs is to force a little bit the interpretation of "lets me operate the computer". Just because "it" doesn't need an OS to run, it doesn't have to be itself an OS.

I think the issue is that there's no name for that kind of software which are just programs that run on bare metal. So everyone just call it an "OS" - including embedded system software vendors even though what is being sold is really just a library.

But often you have no kernel, no drivers, no resource management, no filesystem, no processes... All features one would expect from an operating system.

Furthermore, operating systems in the generally accepted definition are not supposed to include an interpreter or a compiler. They are not supposed to be interpreters or compilers.

So that's not hair-splitting at all. Those systems are really distinct from operating systems.

J and other variants were bad ideas and continue to be bad ideas. They abandon one of the more powerful aspects of APL: Notation.

Here's a paper by Ken Iverson about the power of APL notation:

http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pd...

Why does J exist?

Back in the mid 80's (I don't remember exactly) dealing with APL on IBM PC's was not easy. You really had to want to run APL.

For example, we had to hack the equivalent of today's graphics card to replace the character ROM with one programmed to display APL characters. The more advanced modification allowed you to throw a mechanical switch and go between APL and non-APL characters.

Printing APL characters required using very specific printers and changing the print wheel or ball (IBM printers) with versions having APL characters.

Again, you really had to want to run APL to endure this. And, that, of course, affected adoption. You couldn't run APL on any random IBM PC or clone on a desk.

So, Iverson, despite identifying notation as one of the more powerful features of APL, ends-up "going commercial" by transliterating APL symbols into combinations of ASCII characters. Now you could run something that behaved like APL on any computer. And, of course, it was a complete abomination. Terrible thing.

I think I can say the APL community rejected J almost universally. Doing this was a terrible idea. And a short-sighted one at that. It wasn't long til all computers had the ability to display expanded character sets and eventually full graphical canvases where anything was possible.

J was a commercial reaction to a hardware problem that evaporated very quickly. J was not a commercial success for reasons obvious to those of us who used APL professionally every day for years: It was a hot mess and almost diametrically opposed to what made APL so incredible to use in solving problems through computing.

I would stay far away from J. As brilliant as Iverson had to be to create APL when he did, J, as far as I am concerned, was an almost unforgivable mistake.

No, I haven't sorry. I agree with the other comment in that APL, if it is to go anywhere, needs to be open sourced. I'll go beyond that and say that what we need is a new iteration of APL that addresses all the issues with a language that is now at least 30 years away from its most active and innovative period. That's a tall order. I can see getting into something like that as a retirement project. Way too much other good stuff to do now.

Would you be able to comment about how much of it is the underlying APL (and math coded therein), and how much of it is the Electric GUI ?

Your comparison to musical notation is insightful. I think that I can expand upon it a bit. I can read both western notation and Byzantine notation. Byzantine notation is very different from western notation: it describes a melody using symbols indicating how many steps to take from the current pitch in a given scale. There are also rhythmic symbols added to the notes that generally require reading ahead of what you are currently singing.

For people interested in Byzantine music, the notation can seem imposing at first -- especially to people who already know western notation. Much effort has gone into translating Byzantine music into western notation, but some problems arise. First, some Byzantine scales use very different pitches compared to a western equal tempered scale. Second, the rhythms in Byzantine music can involve syncopation or other rhythms that can be difficult to notate using western rhythmic symbols. Finally, Byzantine notation is optimized for depicting melody, while western notation is focused on harmony. There is simply more unnecessary visual noise in writing Byzantine music in western notation.

That last point resonates with your talk of idioms. While Byzantine music may seem to have many neumes for a given musical phrase, there are many idiomatic combinations of pitch-changing and rhythmic neumes together. As such, what would be read in Western notation with many individual notes and rhythmic markings, becomes in Byzantine notation a single "word".

If you're interested in seeing how these systems of notation compare, look at the following hymn: http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Che... The neumes are in red at the top, with a simple western interpretation on the first western music staff and an ornamented interpretation on the bottom staff. Comparing the neumes to ornamented western interpretation (which represents the full Byzantine ethos, or style), we can see that significantly more information is contained in the sparser Byzantine neumes.

Anyway, you've convinced me to learn APL because I now see how similar the arguments for this notation are to my own arguments for using Byzantine notation. Thank you for your insight.