APL deserves its renaissance too
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APL deserves its renaissance too
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Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#2I will support this, but only if IBM brings back the beam-spring keyboard.
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#3I'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.
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#4Really accessible tutorial format here. More of this could get more people into APL.
(Although truthfully I don't think that char set will ever fly in a broad commercial sense)
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#5The MCM/70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCM/70 , another early microcomputer which failed to thrive, was also an APL machine. In fact, the computer pictured at the bottom of the article is an MCM/70. Interesting to consider what maybe could have been.
(One reason the MCM/70 wouldn't have had BASIC is that its development predates BASIC Computer Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games , apparently the original, 1973 publication of BASIC listings. Those were all games written on and for the Dartmouth BASIC system or other DEC microcomputers. I think (I am not an expert) it was probably this corpus, and its publication in a readily-available book, that originally drew microcomputer systems like the ALTAIR towards supporting BASIC.)
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#6I've felt that high-DPI touchscreens are the opportunity for an APL renaissance, if there's ever going to be one.
Once hardware keyboards standardized around ASCII in the '70s, it cramped the promise of APL's custom notation. On touchscreen it's trivial to render a software keyboard that contains the entire symbol set (perhaps even adapted to the user's experience level to make it less scary initially?). Increased resolution could be used to make the programs easier to parse visually by e.g. scaling symbols based on their context and nesting level, just like we do in math equations.
I'd like to work on an open source APL variant that runs on iPad and/or touchscreen Windows. It should be aimed at entry-level programmers because they don't have the imperative mindset strongly ingrained yet. It would be interesting to see if "touch APL as first language" could be a viable approach to teaching programming. Just need to find the time somehow... :/
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#7Could Numpy be considered the APL renaissance? Not in syntax, but conceptually?
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#8I've felt that high-DPI touchscreens are the opportunity for an APL renaissance, if there's ever going to be one. Once hardware keyboards standardized around ASCII in the '70s, it cramped the promise of APL's custom notation. On touchscreen it's trivial to render a software keyboard that contains the entire symbol set (perhaps even adapted to the user's experience level to make it less scary initially?). Increased re…
What's the intersecting region in the Venn diagram between "people who will program in APL" and "people who will program on a touchscreen" though? They're small circles to begin with— most programmers seem to have an allergic reaction to coding on tablets and APL is kind of a hard sell even notwithstanding the input issue— and so I can't imagine the overlap is many people at all.
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#9I would love apl with types.
Re: APL deserves its renaissance too
#10Thought this very thing a few minutes ago, only to sit down and see this.