APL deserves its renaissance too • Hacker News Board

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#41

Post by blobjectivism » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

todd8 wrote: post #35

derefr wrote: post #30

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…

The popular narratives that 5th generation computing, expert systems, etc failed to deliver because it was the 'wrong path' to take is bs, basically the hardware designers weren't used to non-turing architectures, it was hard to find (and hire) programmers that fully understood both non-imperative paradigms and hardware integration, and government funded science (outside of black budget defense and intelligence projects) education and research started taking a nosedive during the 80s.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#42

Post by enord » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

untangle wrote: post #22

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…

I like your take, and Haskell is an apt comparison in this sense.

Another sense in which i think APL is... un-competitive is that its strengths (terse, mathematical, matrix-centered) are the easy parts of programming, i.e. the parts that are the most objectively quantifiable and verifiable (you just use math).

Accounting for numbers is trivial, accounting for human factors is a proverb.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#43

Post by ASalazarMX » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

g8oz wrote: post #39

noob question: how do I paste those symbols in say Notepad++?

I'm more worried about how to type them with a standard QWERTY keyboard.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#44

Post by mkl » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

g8oz wrote: post #39

noob question: how do I paste those symbols in say Notepad++?

Just copy and paste. They're normal Unicode characters.

If you mean "type" rather than "paste", well that's more complicated.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#45

Post by privong » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #12

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I will support this, but only if IBM brings back the beam-spring keyboard.

The beam-spring keyboards are still being made - someone bought the patents, tooling, and supplies from IBM and their main supplier, 22 years ago and has been making them ever since. http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD

They even sell an APL keycap set: http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/USAPLSET

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#46

Post by 49bc » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #34

iainmerrick wrote: post #32

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…

If you don't like the symbols then there are J and K/Q which are ASCII based but retain many of APLs other characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

If you lose the symbols you lose the terse nature of the language, which as far as I can tell seems to be one of the most alluring parts of the language (the author of the blog post shows game of life as essentially a one-liner).

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#47

Post by keithalewis » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

untangle wrote: post #22

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…

It will not become popular for one simple reason: you have to be smart to understand it. Want to be popular? Write a python^Wlanguage for people who shouldn't even be programming in the first place.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#48

Post by omaranto » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

49bc wrote: post #46

zokier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like the symbols then there are J and K/Q which are ASCII based but retain many of APLs other characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

If you lose the symbols you lose the terse nature of the language, which as far as I can tell seems to be one of the most alluring parts of the language (the author of the blog post shows game of life as essentially a one-liner).

Did you read any J programs? It is just as terse as APL. (Probably K is pretty terse too, but I won't comment on it as I only know J.)

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#49

Post by lobster_johnson » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

49bc wrote: post #46

zokier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like the symbols then there are J and K/Q which are ASCII based but retain many of APLs other characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

If you lose the symbols you lose the terse nature of the language, which as far as I can tell seems to be one of the most alluring parts of the language (the author of the blog post shows game of life as essentially a one-liner).

J and K are extremely terse, though. They just chose other ASCII symbols that exist on everyone's keyboard.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#50

Post by keithnz » Mon, May 28, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

J seems to have its fans ( http://www.jsoftware.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_%28programming_language%29 ) and uses ascii instead of all the different symbols.

Some of the code CAN be quite terse (and cryptic) like

quicksort=: (($:@(#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1I spent a small amount of time learning the basics a while ago, but never really used it for anything. But it was interesting and I'd have to spend a lot more time with it to get into the mindset. Popular with some Code Golfers as well.