31–40 of 123 posts
I would love apl with types.
Have you looked at Perl 6? It's optionally typed, and can be nearly as terse as apl with some of it's higher order operators.
It would definitely work though.
It looks like a bunch of matrix and vector functions with very terse names. Is it significantly different from just taking GLSL, say, and #define-ing one-character names for all the built-in functions? What is APL’s secret sauce?
This article suggests that a lot of the fun is just the cryptic symbols themselves. That’s absolutely fine, but it doesn’t seem like something that “deserves” a renaissance, compared to, say, Lisp, which really does have a uniquely productive idea at its core.
I want to draw APL. Like with a stylus. That's pretty much how I'd want to use it, and the only way I'd bother. It's cool tech but it's general purpose appeal is nonexistent and there is already Julia and Matlab in technical computing space. If I could draw APL symbols and have some common libraries for JSON and Http and stuff like that, I could see a renaissance having enough steam to do something. Otherwise, it's o…
Remember the Palm Pilot? Drawing the ASCII-ish symbols in the little box? While I did memorize the strokes, I never found the process efficient. I don't think that drawing APL runes would be any better -- certainly not better than the key-combos of Dyalog's bespoke APL editor (free for personal use, BTW).
So, I've never written apl, and I'm glad I read this comment because that's an excellent point you raise.
To expand a bit, I was thinking about being able to notate computation graphically. That's really what I want. Visual programming has existed and has sucked forever, but those thoughts don't go away that there might be a way to do it, if I just had the missing piece.
I need to sit down with dyalog and find out what I'm missing, it sounds like.
Thanks!
I keep hearing APL is great, but like everyone else I find the cryptic symbols very off-putting. I haven’t seen a really compelling explanation for why it’s great. It looks like a bunch of matrix and vector functions with very terse names. Is it significantly different from just taking GLSL, say, and #define-ing one-character names for all the built-in functions? What is APL’s secret sauce? This article suggests that…
Neat little tribute article. APL will not be reborn. If that was going to happen, this century's embrace of analytics and linear-algebra-rich machine learning would have propelled the upswell. It didn't and it won't. Why? It's not the symbols. Not the keyboard. Nor the learning curve. Nor the lack of standardization, libraries, or GPU support. These are collateral damage, not primary drivers. APL will not flourish be…
Is there a reason one wouldn’t just build the core engine of SIMD math software in APL, much like people build the core engines of medical-system software in Prolog?
In the early 80's I experimented with Prolog. Simple ideas were simply coded into programs; it was really very interesting. However, the need to understand the compiler's inner workings to get programs that ran efficiently by manually inserting "cuts" to limit backtracking ruins Prolog's claim to being simple to translate requirements into programs.
An even more serious problem with Prolog is the simplicity of it's model for logic. It is very easy to end up with requirements in the real world that don't easily fit the model. See for example the SHOOT problem in [1], where the concluding sentence is:
> As such, the claim implicit in the development of nonmonotonic logics--that a simple extension to classical logic would result in the power to express an important class of human nondeductive reasoning--is certainly called into question by our result.
Don't get me wrong, I was the Chief Scientist at a company with one Prolog based product. I still thinks its an interesting language, but I predict that it will remain eclipsed by much more general purpose programming languages.
Neat little tribute article. APL will not be reborn. If that was going to happen, this century's embrace of analytics and linear-algebra-rich machine learning would have propelled the upswell. It didn't and it won't. Why? It's not the symbols. Not the keyboard. Nor the learning curve. Nor the lack of standardization, libraries, or GPU support. These are collateral damage, not primary drivers. APL will not flourish be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason one wouldn’t just build the core engine of SIMD math software in APL, much like people build the core engines of medical-system software in Prolog?
Is Prolog really used for medical-system software? It seems to me that it turned out to be the wrong path taken by Japan's Fifth Generation Project. In the early 80's I experimented with Prolog. Simple ideas were simply coded into programs; it was really very interesting. However, the need to understand the compiler's inner workings to get programs that ran efficiently by manually inserting "cuts" to limit backtracki…
I keep hearing APL is great, but like everyone else I find the cryptic symbols very off-putting. I haven’t seen a really compelling explanation for why it’s great. It looks like a bunch of matrix and vector functions with very terse names. Is it significantly different from just taking GLSL, say, and #define-ing one-character names for all the built-in functions? What is APL’s secret sauce? This article suggests that…