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An anecdote about my first and only brush with an APL programmer: Towards the end of the nineties I was a young computer science student standing on an almost
by willvarfar 8y ago
An anecdote about my first and only brush with an APL programmer:
Towards the end of the nineties I was a young computer science student standing on an almost deserted suburban above-ground underground station waiting for the next train into the centre of London.
A very old but brisk and snappy gentleman in traditional gentleman's clothes came onto the platform, and for some reason we nodded genially as you do when you pass strangers on country lanes; in London you ignore absolutely everyone, so it was strange we did this.
And there we stood, waiting for the train. He offered me a peppermint from a small metal tin. Of course my parents taught me to never take sweets from strangers, so I instinctively declined even though I'd now left home and thought of my self as a grown-up.
Anyway, we got talking. At first it was 'what are you studying?' kind of polite interest. He was intrigued that I was a computer science student.
I've gotta underline again how unusual this was, for anyone in London to ever talk to another stranger, but this really happened. I don't think I ever acknowledged there was anyone else in London, ever. It wasn't even normal to know the names of your neighbours.
And so we sat beside each other on an underground train and he told me about his early years as a programmer. Did I know APL, he asked? I had never heard of it! His veiled references suggested he worked with but not for Cheltenham.
And he delighted in telling me programmer war stories from when he did commercial stuff like how a vendor had encrypted their APL programs and he had reverse engineered it and waved the decrypted source-code in front of the firm's rep and complained about shoddy code and bugs! At the time I was tackling Simon Singh's Code Book contest so that kind of story caught my imagination and I begun to wish I'd have that kind of chance in my programming future.
Now, in his old age, he went from his home in the north of England down to London once a week for a charity meeting he chaired. That's the kind of thing respectable old gentleman do to give their life meaning, I guess.
Anyway, afterwards I searched the web for APL (this was before google) and was, of course, gobsmacked.
- smcl 8y agoFor non-Brits, "Cheltenham" = GCHQ
- nostrademons 8y agoFor non-Brits, GCHQ = the British intelligence service, roughly equivalent to the US NSA. (This non-Brit had to Google.)
- subcosmos 8y agoMy hobby : Showing people in the bay area this photograph and asking them if they've seen the new Apple HQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters#/media/File:Aerial_of_GCHQ,_Cheltenham,_Gloucestershire,_England_24May2017_arp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Head...
- smcl 8y agoAh sorry, I figured that after all the Snowden leaks the intelligence service acronyms were widely known on HN. GHCQ were particularly prominent in many of the leaks
- KineticLensman 8y agoa.k.a "The Doughnut" because of the shape of the building: [0] // For non-Brits, 'doughnut' = 'donut' [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 8y agoYour mint-taking joke made me laugh weirdly, so much I tripped my whole cup of tea on my lap. I need gravityproof tea cups now.
- excitom 8y agoSpeaking of gobsmacked, check out this use of APL notation to formally describe the IBM System/360. https://web.archive.org/web/20060813132807/https://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/032/falkoff.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060813132807/https://www.resea...
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoIf you're interested in APL to describe hardware, perhaps you're interested in a language based on APL to actually build hardware. Many decades ago there was a hardware description language based on APL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHPL I studied it as part of a university course circa 1975. Wiley published a typo-infested book about it. Using Google verbatim for "a hardware programming language" provides a plethora of hits. But then VHDL and Verilog happened and the rest, as they say, is history.
- excitom 8y agoI, too, studied this in the late 70s. Interesting stuff.
- aap_ 8y agoThanks for linking this. Looks very cool.
- theoh 8y agoThere are interesting histories, like this one, that are apparently very little known in today's UK computer industry: https://books.google.com/books?id=Dhk9wHXfQMkC https://books.google.com/books?id=Dhk9wHXfQMkC