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APL deserves its renaissance too

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Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#81

Post by dTal »

yeukhon wrote: post #76

Oh god no. This would kill programming productivity. Why people like these complicated programming languages? Seriously...

Your comment reminded me very much of a paragraph in "Beating the Averages"[1]:

"As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#83

Post by yiyus »

anonu wrote: post #69
FractalLP wrote: post #3

I'd love for it to go more mainstream with a high performance open source implementation. Dyalog is pretty good, and I like J, but feel the missing symbol leaves something out. K/Q with kdb+ is too expensive, and the other open source array language implementations (Qnial, Klong, Kona, GNUAPL)are just not there.

Kx could be much bigger if they open sourced the q interpreter, tapped into a larger developer pool who could write libraries and add ons. There's more money in selling consulting services than licenses...

As much as I would love that, I do not think getting bigger is an issue for Kx. It seems to me they are doing quite well with their current model.

I have read before (sorry, I do not have the link) that Arthur Whitney does not really believe in open source. That is unfortunate (and a mistake, if you ask me). Even if he did not release a complete product, I would like to study his code. Reading and trying to understand kparc.com/b/ is a very enlightening experience. I wish k.c was there too.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#84

Post by yiyus »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #14

No, it does not. I used APL professioally for about ten years back in the 80's. I love the language. It is incredibly powerful. Once you internalize it's like playing the piano, you don't think about the mechanics you play music. However, the language did not stand the test of time for far more important issues than the inconvenience of the character set and the keyboard. And, no, J is not a successor to APL, even th…

I find both APL and Forth fascinating. I would not try to promote them as a replacement for newer more approachable languages, but I think that learning them gives you different points of view and are worth learning for every programmer (same with FP, for example).

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#85

Post by icen »

a-saleh wrote: post #80

I remember being floored by APL few months ago when I learned about co-dnfs and watched the stream by Aaron Hsu [1] with quotes like "This code is perfectly readable, it just isn't in English". Thing is, when I was thinking about trying it, I never figured out a good toy project. Like, when I wanted to try anything else, most of the time I would know I would be able to cobble together a web-service. Haskell, Erlang,…

Do some deep learning. It's very straightfoward, and you only need some trivial IO.

Writing a programming language in APL is not for the faint of heart - co-dfns is, alongside it's performance goals, to show that compilers aren't necessarily a bad fit for APL.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#86

Post by icen »

uryga wrote: post #57
qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

APL looks like the best programming language I've ever seen. I wish it could be extended with SQL and web-service mappings to input-output data conveniently and to use functions written in other languages (like C and Python) for acceleration and rapid logic prototyping.

Well, there's K, along with its flagship database KDB which lets you write SQL-like queries and, from what I've heard, integrates very nicely with the language. idk how good their FFI story is. Unfortunately, you need to pay for commercial use.

You can extend kdb with c functions, but they need to take/return their internal K structures, so you'll need to wrap functions. `2:` is the thing to look at.

Otherwise there's ipc clients, and a very nice native python integration now.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#87

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

derefr wrote: post #37
todd8 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is! You don't use it for diagnosis; you use it to formalize treatment guidelines (which are effectively 'expert systems' even on paper.) It runs alongside more ML-based models, glued together under business-logic written in something like Java.

You have got to give more details about this :)

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#88

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> 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.

Where does this claim come from? Prolog is an automated theorem prover for first-order logic theories. There have certainly been various arguments about the pros and cons of it made by many different people (not all of whom were close to the development of the language), but the fact remains that its main characteristic is the automation of a proof process.

You can certainly find many flaws in Prolog if you look hard enough and choose your requirements carefully (for example- it has no functions! Why has it no functions? It should have functions! Therefore, it sucks).

I think a lot of the bad rep Prolog's got over the years is the result of promises by various sources that had nothing to do with its actual goal, which was to create a language with the syntax and semantics of FOL- which it achieves not perfectly, but way, way better than anything else out there.

>> I still thinks its an interesting language, but I predict that it will remain eclipsed by much more general purpose programming languages.

That's probably true, though :)

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#89

Post by FractalLP »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

APL looks like the best programming language I've ever seen. I wish it could be extended with SQL and web-service mappings to input-output data conveniently and to use functions written in other languages (like C and Python) for acceleration and rapid logic prototyping.

Dyalog has a web server and a fully documented SQL library.

Re: APL deserves its renaissance too

#90

Post by FractalLP »

yiyus wrote: post #83
anonu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kx could be much bigger if they open sourced the q interpreter, tapped into a larger developer pool who could write libraries and add ons. There's more money in selling consulting services than licenses...

As much as I would love that, I do not think getting bigger is an issue for Kx. It seems to me they are doing quite well with their current model. I have read before (sorry, I do not have the link) that Arthur Whitney does not really believe in open source. That is unfortunate (and a mistake, if you ask me). Even if he did not release a complete product, I would like to study his code. Reading and trying to understan…

From what I understand, they've made millions off of the big banking clients and that is probably quite straightforward as opposed to making money off open source.
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