A Personal History of APL (1982)
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A Personal History of APL (1982)
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Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#2We had APL on our Prime minicomputer at Swarthmore when I started there in 1978.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#3I used APL professionally for about ten years. One of the most interesting applications I worked on was the analysis of DNA sequencing data during the Human Genome project.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#4It's at least reassuring to learn from the 1952-1954 section that the phenomenon of doing things without having any clue about them easily predates the microprocessor.
(btw I second the recommendation of the 1962 A Programming Language)
Edit:
> The third page had an illustration that, in a few short lines, described George Dantzig's simplex algorithm simply and precisely.
> That was the overwhelming, crucial experience.
This is the crucial feature of the APL family for me: they permit algorithm discussions via inline, not block, content.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970345
Edit 2: Upon reflection, it's probably also the Achilles' Heel of the APL family: most people vastly prefer easy and DWIMy over simple and precise.
Edit 3: found the paper containing the simplex algorithm: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DFSP.htm Note that 1960 was before "structured programming" so we now have (with the benefit of hindsight) much better ways to express the control flow of this calculation.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#5I find it sad that APL nowadays means Dyalog. They appear to do amazing work. Unfortunately, the license isn't open. Why would I invest time learning it only to be locked in? I wonder how much licensing plays in APL not being more popular and used in the present day. There are open variants, like GNU APL2 and J. However, GNU APL2 has none of the advancements made in the past 40 years and J is J, not APL. The notation is simply different.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#6I find it sad that APL nowadays means Dyalog. They appear to do amazing work. Unfortunately, the license isn't open. Why would I invest time learning it only to be locked in? I wonder how much licensing plays in APL not being more popular and used in the present day. There are open variants, like GNU APL2 and J. However, GNU APL2 has none of the advancements made in the past 40 years and J is J, not APL. The notation…
There's also April APL: https://github.com/phantomics/april
Also the array language family seems to be stronger than ever with foss: ngn/k, BQN, uiua, and of course J but as you mentioned they're all different languages.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#7I find it sad that APL nowadays means Dyalog. They appear to do amazing work. Unfortunately, the license isn't open. Why would I invest time learning it only to be locked in? I wonder how much licensing plays in APL not being more popular and used in the present day. There are open variants, like GNU APL2 and J. However, GNU APL2 has none of the advancements made in the past 40 years and J is J, not APL. The notation…
There's also April APL: https://github.com/phantomics/april Also the array language family seems to be stronger than ever with foss: ngn/k, BQN, uiua, and of course J but as you mentioned they're all different languages.
I cant recommend enough this april video of Andrew Sengul:
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#8I find it sad that APL nowadays means Dyalog. They appear to do amazing work. Unfortunately, the license isn't open. Why would I invest time learning it only to be locked in? I wonder how much licensing plays in APL not being more popular and used in the present day. There are open variants, like GNU APL2 and J. However, GNU APL2 has none of the advancements made in the past 40 years and J is J, not APL. The notation…
Anyone is of course free to fork GNU APL, or any other APLish FOSS language, and modify it to include Dyalog APL's features. However, Dyalog can only do so much amazing work because users that make significant amounts of money with Dyalog APL pay enough to support 25 full-time employees. Note that as long as you make less than £5000 per year from its usage, you can use Dyalog APL without limitations.
Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#9I find it sad that APL nowadays means Dyalog. They appear to do amazing work. Unfortunately, the license isn't open. Why would I invest time learning it only to be locked in? I wonder how much licensing plays in APL not being more popular and used in the present day. There are open variants, like GNU APL2 and J. However, GNU APL2 has none of the advancements made in the past 40 years and J is J, not APL. The notation…
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Re: A Personal History of APL (1982)
#10Can APL can be used to implement Machine Learning algorithms?
It seems like a good fit.