6 ms·

This is awesome. I always recommend that people at least look into APL, to get a taste of how different some paradigms of programming are from what they're use

This is awesome. I always recommend that people at least look into APL, to get a taste of how different some paradigms of programming are from what they're used to. Unfortunately, the de factor implementation of APL (Dyalog) is proprietary, and last I checked, the process of getting a trial license takes too much time to be worth it for people with only a passing interest. It's great to see another open source implementation. Here's my favourite video of APL in action. It'll blow your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

Avshalom 10y ago
not to take away from this, which is quite cool but: GnuAPL is coming along nicely, and of course libre. Dyalog has a 32-bit windows (though it works on wine middling well) only unregistered version http://dyalog.com/download-zone/unregistered.htm http://dyalog.com/download-zone/unregistered.htm that other than a splash screen works great. Also if you're a student: I sent them like a 2 sentence email(from a .edu domain) that basically said "hey I'm a student, I wanted to play around with APL for data analysis" and they got back to me with a student license in like a couple hours. I am wary of proprietary environments I'm not going to argue for them, but getting a hold of a working+legal copy of Dyalog is actually pretty painless
- ShaneWilton 10y ago
  > I'm not going to argue for them, but getting a hold of a working+legal copy of Dyalog is actually pretty painless That's good to hear. Last time I tried it took a few days for them to get back to me. I'm also excited to give GnuAPL another try too. It looks like it's coming a long way since the initial release.
  - eggy 10y ago
    If you're serious about investing time in something, 2 days is not much, although it didn't take that long for me. Dyalog has great documentation, videos, and resources. I tried NARS2000, a free version of APL, but it was not as polished. I mainly use J, and since Ken Iverson created APL, and then went on to create J with the help of a bunch of other smart people. J has certain things not found in Dyalog APL, and is very functional with trains and forks and general function composition. J is damn fast for an interpreted language, and the Jd database, which is a bit slower than kdb+/q, still is faster than many Spark/Shark setups for big data. I am waiting for something like Futhark mentioned below, which marries J or APL to the GPU or FPGA or other hybrid card. A true vector/array language running on true array hardware, hopefully ridding the CPU-GPU bottleneck back and forth between host and device. Plus I just like playing with J. I have used Lisp/Scheme for years, but languages like Forth and J/APL/K/Q really blow my mind, more so than the legendary Lisp ,'epiphany' at least for me.
- Athas 10y ago
  > GnuAPL is coming along nicely, and of course libre. From what I have been able to determine, most APL performance comes from hand-tuned implementations of the primitives, and of specially recognised idioms[0], for which the interpreter generates specialised code. This seems to imply that building an efficient APL interpreter requires a significant amount of manpower to implement all these cases, rather than being able to get away with having a few simple good ideas. Are you aware of any GNU APL vs Dyalog performance comparisons? [0]: http://aplwiki.com/FinnAplIdiomLibrary http://aplwiki.com/FinnAplIdiomLibrary
  - beagle3 10y ago
    Your implication does not follow from your correct observation. APLs (including J and K) work from the simplest principles, and from then on it is just optimization. K was implemented by Arthur Whitney, who implemented all the primitives (and their special cases) himself. At some point, if I am not mistaken, Niall Dalton rewrote some parts to be even faster - most primitives are easy to do efficiently (though a stunt programmer can definitely do them more efficiently), and most importantly - most patterns are too. E.g. "a@<a" means "sorted a". "*a@<a" and "&/a" both mean "minimum value in a" (each is a different recipe to compute it). It's not hard to implement, and beyond the primitives, 200 patterns cover a very significant percentage of use cases, and are definitely within the realm of possibility for a single person, let alone demigods like Arthur Whitney, Niall Dalton, Mike Pall, or a small team.
    - uudecode 10y ago
      Silly question: Historically, did anyone ever attempt to create the APL primitives as separate utilities? The crazy idea that keeps recurring in my mind is that one could have a UNIX userland made of APL primitives. k's mmap approach, avoiding I/O, is preferable. But even if one used a named pipe or UNIX socket to do IPC, perhaps it could still be fast enough to be useful or fun. Feel free to dismiss this idea, but please kindly explain why it would not work.
      - jxy 10y ago
- mkromberg 10y ago
  As of June 30th, when Dyalog v15.0 was released, Personal/Non-Commercial licenses are free of charge for 64-bit Windows, Linux and OS/X - and on the Raspberry Pi. We are in the process of streamlining the registration screen, please bear with us for a little while longer until it catches up.
cmrx64 10y ago
I'm a huge fan of J, which is a descendant of APL, and has a libre implementation. I think it offers many of the same advantages in learning the array programming "paradigm", and has a few tricks of its own.

Avshalom 10y ago

not to take away from this, which is quite cool but: GnuAPL is coming along nicely, and of course libre. Dyalog has a 32-bit windows (though it works on wine middling well) only unregistered version http://dyalog.com/download-zone/unregistered.htm http://dyalog.com/download-zone/unregistered.htm that other than a splash screen works great. Also if you're a student: I sent them like a 2 sentence email(from a .edu domain) that basically said "hey I'm a student, I wanted to play around with APL for data analysis" and they got back to me with a student license in like a couple hours. I am wary of proprietary environments I'm not going to argue for them, but getting a hold of a working+legal copy of Dyalog is actually pretty painless

ShaneWilton 10y ago
> I'm not going to argue for them, but getting a hold of a working+legal copy of Dyalog is actually pretty painless That's good to hear. Last time I tried it took a few days for them to get back to me. I'm also excited to give GnuAPL another try too. It looks like it's coming a long way since the initial release.
- eggy 10y ago
  If you're serious about investing time in something, 2 days is not much, although it didn't take that long for me. Dyalog has great documentation, videos, and resources. I tried NARS2000, a free version of APL, but it was not as polished. I mainly use J, and since Ken Iverson created APL, and then went on to create J with the help of a bunch of other smart people. J has certain things not found in Dyalog APL, and is very functional with trains and forks and general function composition. J is damn fast for an interpreted language, and the Jd database, which is a bit slower than kdb+/q, still is faster than many Spark/Shark setups for big data. I am waiting for something like Futhark mentioned below, which marries J or APL to the GPU or FPGA or other hybrid card. A true vector/array language running on true array hardware, hopefully ridding the CPU-GPU bottleneck back and forth between host and device. Plus I just like playing with J. I have used Lisp/Scheme for years, but languages like Forth and J/APL/K/Q really blow my mind, more so than the legendary Lisp ,'epiphany' at least for me.
Athas 10y ago
> GnuAPL is coming along nicely, and of course libre. From what I have been able to determine, most APL performance comes from hand-tuned implementations of the primitives, and of specially recognised idioms[0], for which the interpreter generates specialised code. This seems to imply that building an efficient APL interpreter requires a significant amount of manpower to implement all these cases, rather than being able to get away with having a few simple good ideas. Are you aware of any GNU APL vs Dyalog performance comparisons? [0]: http://aplwiki.com/FinnAplIdiomLibrary http://aplwiki.com/FinnAplIdiomLibrary
- beagle3 10y ago
  Your implication does not follow from your correct observation. APLs (including J and K) work from the simplest principles, and from then on it is just optimization. K was implemented by Arthur Whitney, who implemented all the primitives (and their special cases) himself. At some point, if I am not mistaken, Niall Dalton rewrote some parts to be even faster - most primitives are easy to do efficiently (though a stunt programmer can definitely do them more efficiently), and most importantly - most patterns are too. E.g. "a@<a" means "sorted a". "*a@<a" and "&/a" both mean "minimum value in a" (each is a different recipe to compute it). It's not hard to implement, and beyond the primitives, 200 patterns cover a very significant percentage of use cases, and are definitely within the realm of possibility for a single person, let alone demigods like Arthur Whitney, Niall Dalton, Mike Pall, or a small team.
  - uudecode 10y ago
    Silly question: Historically, did anyone ever attempt to create the APL primitives as separate utilities? The crazy idea that keeps recurring in my mind is that one could have a UNIX userland made of APL primitives. k's mmap approach, avoiding I/O, is preferable. But even if one used a named pipe or UNIX socket to do IPC, perhaps it could still be fast enough to be useful or fun. Feel free to dismiss this idea, but please kindly explain why it would not work.
    - jxy 10y ago
mkromberg 10y ago
As of June 30th, when Dyalog v15.0 was released, Personal/Non-Commercial licenses are free of charge for 64-bit Windows, Linux and OS/X - and on the Raspberry Pi. We are in the process of streamlining the registration screen, please bear with us for a little while longer until it catches up.

cmrx64 10y ago

I'm a huge fan of J, which is a descendant of APL, and has a libre implementation. I think it offers many of the same advantages in learning the array programming "paradigm", and has a few tricks of its own.