APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006) • Hacker News Board

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#21

Post by lokedhs » Thu, May 29, 2014, 7:48 AM UTC

aidos wrote: post #7

jamesaguilar wrote: post #4

But only if you have the digital flexibility of a monkey. That said, this is always worth watching as a demo of the language's power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 . I'm not afraid to admit that I wish my language could do that.

This is one of my favourite coding videos and everyone should watch it. It's nice to see it again having read through a description of how APL works.

f you want to try it in your browser without having to send each command to the server for evaluation: http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#22

Post by lokedhs » Thu, May 29, 2014, 7:58 AM UTC

jjfine wrote: post #20

All I could think of while reading this was, how am I supposed to type all those weird characters?

You can use Emacs: https://github.com/lokedhs/gnu-apl-mode

Yes, I'm advertising my own work here.

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#23

Post by michaelfeathers » Thu, May 29, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

kd0amg wrote: post #17

jbclements wrote: post #11

From a PL standpoint: 1) APL clearly made good use of an extensive symbol set. Now that many languages support unicode, this is totally do-able. 2) APL is in love with overloading. It's not totally my cup of tea, but you could definitely fit this into many modern languages. 3) I see a whole lot of MATLAB in there. 4) Did... this article actually define any functions at all? Perhaps I missed this. 5) It looks you coul…

5) It looks you could easily implement APL as a DSL within an existing language with an extensible parser. Racket, for instance. I'm working on something along these lines, but not planning on keeping the APL/J-like syntax (the many meanings of juxtaposition makes parsing a line depend on the run time values attached to names). You can get more of the core idea of APL out of prop:procedure than out of extensible pars…

I've been doing something similar as a gem to add J commands to Ruby: https://github.com/michaelfeathers/jop

The fluent interface is likely to win because I don't want to implement hook and fork.

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#24

Post by ritonlajoie » Thu, May 29, 2014, 10:18 AM UTC

I have an issue with APL. My grandfather who is a researcher in forest science (sorry English is not my main language), made his own software in APL to manage his own forest. Now, he is becoming old, and trying to get me to get the software, and to understand it for when he will pass.

The thing is, I'm a C++ dev professionally, but whenever I see his code in APL, I cringe. I can't get to make him understand that building what is basically a dynamic spreadsheet in APL is kind of complicated for me, coming from an OO side of programming. Also, that's the only language he knows.

I have a hard time telling him that all the work he did and still does in APL (I guess now there are like thousands of lines) will just go to trash and my uncles will just use Excel to do that when they'll take over the forest business.

Edit: I have another issue with DyalogAPL. When my grandfather sends me a workspace , I can't open it because DyalogAPL is not that much backward compatible ! So if we don't have the exact same version, I just can't open his workspace. It's 2014 , damn !

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#25

Post by TheZenPsycho » Thu, May 29, 2014, 10:45 AM UTC

ritonlajoie wrote: post #24

I have an issue with APL. My grandfather who is a researcher in forest science (sorry English is not my main language), made his own software in APL to manage his own forest. Now, he is becoming old, and trying to get me to get the software, and to understand it for when he will pass. The thing is, I'm a C++ dev professionally, but whenever I see his code in APL, I cringe. I can't get to make him understand that buil…

Man, I hope when I have grandchildren, they won't want to throw a bundle of my life's work in the trash.

Maybe github instead?

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#26

Post by ritonlajoie » Thu, May 29, 2014, 10:49 AM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #25

ritonlajoie wrote: post #24

I have an issue with APL. My grandfather who is a researcher in forest science (sorry English is not my main language), made his own software in APL to manage his own forest. Now, he is becoming old, and trying to get me to get the software, and to understand it for when he will pass. The thing is, I'm a C++ dev professionally, but whenever I see his code in APL, I cringe. I can't get to make him understand that buil…

Man, I hope when I have grandchildren, they won't want to throw a bundle of my life's work in the trash. Maybe github instead?

Well, I don't want to... but I have no time nor real interest in trying to understand what he did in APL. My only issue is that he is not interested in hearing from me that nobody will take over what he did.. He won't listen ;( He thinks everything else sucks.. I tried to make him read some stuff about python for example. He said this sucked also ! lol

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#27

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 29, 2014, 11:10 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #19

realo wrote: post #15

I did quite a bit of APL programming when I was younger. When describing APL, people talk about the strange symbols, the mathematics, etc... but I have never seen anyone describe something I only realized after some time: APL makes you approach problems quite differently, when you are familiar with it. I stopped thinking in 'steps' applied to the individual data points, but rather I solved the problem in my head (and…

So what I'd like to know is how that "quite different" approach to problems differs from the standard mathematician approach? I've been playing with J lately. I've also been a longtime numpy user, going back to the days when it was still numarray. Maybe I'm just writing numpy in J, but I find that my approach in both languages is more or less identical: set up a vector, do some matrix operations, maybe some statistic…

It's quite similar to the standard mathematician approach. It's extremely different from the standard (imperative-trained) programmer approach.

(Note your use of "write down the answer": this is a giveaway that you understand it so well that you're not even aware of your understanding, and might therefore find it hard to explain)

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 29, 2014, 11:22 AM UTC

ritonlajoie wrote: post #26

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I hope when I have grandchildren, they won't want to throw a bundle of my life's work in the trash. Maybe github instead?

Well, I don't want to... but I have no time nor real interest in trying to understand what he did in APL. My only issue is that he is not interested in hearing from me that nobody will take over what he did.. He won't listen ;( He thinks everything else sucks.. I tried to make him read some stuff about python for example. He said this sucked also ! lol

[deleted]

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#29

Post by jacquesm » Thu, May 29, 2014, 11:28 AM UTC

ritonlajoie wrote: post #26

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I hope when I have grandchildren, they won't want to throw a bundle of my life's work in the trash. Maybe github instead?

Well, I don't want to... but I have no time nor real interest in trying to understand what he did in APL. My only issue is that he is not interested in hearing from me that nobody will take over what he did.. He won't listen ;( He thinks everything else sucks.. I tried to make him read some stuff about python for example. He said this sucked also ! lol

Consider the possibility that what your grandfather tells you might actually be true.

Re: APL – a Glimpse of Heaven (2006)

#30

Post by gaius » Thu, May 29, 2014, 12:45 PM UTC

He is missing the middle generation - he jumps straight from the 70s (mainframe) to the 90s (Internet) while missing the people like me who grew up with 8-bit systems in the 80s.