A deep dive into APL • Hacker News Board

Re: A deep dive into APL

#91

Post by rebootthesystem » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 6:45 AM UTC

muraiki wrote: post #89

rebootthesystem wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Hence the idea of notation as as tool for thought. APL makes you see and envision computational problem solving differently than, say C. Use it enough and your brain starts thinking in patterns, shapes, vectors and matrices being "zippered" together or apart, contorted and distorted. Take a matrix of values and hit it with another matrix of 1's and 0's to select elements and then flip it, slice it, convert i…

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…

This is very interesting. I sight read western notation but never learned anything else. To be honest, I didn't even know Byzantine notation existed. Time to go learn something new. Thanks!

Re: A deep dive into APL

#92

Post by FractalNerve » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

throwaway7645 wrote: post #79

FractalNerve wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think it's the future, the problem is that I don't believe that Dyalog APL is the future, even though it's really nice. It just should be opensource to succeed imho., why still be so greedy and take money for a language. Also the IDE is really weird. I love APL and J, but I think there is a lot of space for improvement. And I want that improvement to happen in the open. They can still charge for Consulting, Ho…

I'm curious if it would be so nice as a non-commercial project. I suppose some companies would still pay for support and development.

You mean a funding model similar to FreeBSD, right? With the right partnerships this could indeed work very well. At a time where even Microsoft opensources their compilers, Dyalog keeping theirs from the ~70s closed is mind bending to me.

And I agree, I would pay, even if it's not that much. The commercial license comes with a too steep price tag. I'd rather opensource my code or contribute where I can.

Re: A deep dive into APL

#93

Post by rebootthesystem » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 3:57 AM UTC

muraiki wrote: post #90

rebootthesystem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mentioned in another comment that if APL is to go anywhere, that it needs to be open sourced. Unfortunately, the cost of Dyalog and the fact that it is closed source are the main reasons why I've ended up using J. I appreciate that Dyalog is free for non-commercial use, but I think that part of what makes a programming language successful is if people can start using it in small ways to make their work better. Fo…

Try NARS2000. It's APL with sensible extensions written by someone who knows APL very well.

http://www.nars2000.org/