3 ms·

These are the "higher-level pattern-recognition skills" that I was talking about. You use them to read words; I can also use them for something like (in BQN) -⟜

These are the "higher-level pattern-recognition skills" that I was talking about. You use them to read words; I can also use them for something like (in BQN) -⟜» (subtract previous from current) or +`⊸⊔ (split using start markers). There's an opportunity cost. To be clear, you do think there's an advantage to using symbols for very common operations? APL doesn't have all that many primitives (~60 symbols), and most would fit this requirement. Here's Alan Perlis[0]: "The large number of primitive functions, at first mind-numbing in their capabilities, quickly turn out to be easily mastered, soon almost all are used naturally in every program — the primitive functions form a harmonious and useful set." [0] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm

civilized 5y ago
If APL is so ideally productive and the barriers to its adoption so substantially slight, why has it not won? The programming community has been extremely open-minded to revolutionary new approaches. So very many have gained at least a foothold and a small group of devotees, from LISP to Haskell to Forth to APL. But none of these languages have built communities of a size and productivity to match Python or C or the many other highly successful Algol-family languages. This despite the fact that some of these off-the-beaten-path languages, especially LISP, have a long history of being used as teaching languages. So why hasn't APL taken off already? Surely there must be a more thoughtful answer than "people are Philistines". Perhaps both APLers and LISPers greatly underestimate the challenges of adopting new symbolic notations that are very different from what they're used to in written language and mathematics. Maybe for the average technical person, the cognitive costs are much greater and the benefits much less than they seem to the average APL or LISP fan.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I think it's naive to assume a language would "win" on its own merit. Most of our software today is what it is due to path dependence. Was JavaScript a terrific language? No, it was a little doodle for bringing a little interactivity to websites, which were simple at the time. The web took off; thus JavaScript took off. If the web had never taken off, JS wouldn't be a thing. Same for C. What was so great about C, or its predecessor B? Nothing really. B was a minimal language designed to fit the constraints of a minicomputer. Unix happened, C was a natural evolution of B, Unix took off as a simple & cheap (even free) operating system for cheap computers. C got popular with Unix, and not due to anything revolutionary in its design. C++ rode the OOP hype wave and C's popularity. C#'s popularity is due to Microsoft's massive influence. Java similarly rode the OOP hype train and I guess Sun's marketing towards their many Enterprise customers (who also bought the "write once run anywhere" lie). Remember when PHP was popular? Was that because it was such an awesome language, or was it because it seemed easy and integrated well with this other popular thing that took off (the web)? (On a similar note, it's not clear at all that Linux would have become as popular as it is today if it weren't for the lawsuits looming over the BSDs in the 90s) Of course I'm oversimplifying and glossing over a lot of history but in the decades between Unix and C#, there have been countless programming languages that could have easily challenged each language that I named on their own merit. But that merit does not matter, because that's not what makes a language take off. If anything, the programming community seems rather reluctant to consider different approaches, and when they do it, they would rather do it in the comfort of their existing languages and ecosystem of tools & libraries rather than jump to something new entirely. Lisp and Haskell never got mainstream despite their use in teaching, but I think most of the programming community today sees the value in functional thinking and immutability; thus various constructs that have been historically exclusive to functional programming languages have made it into mainstream languages. You couldn't take lambdas and map & reduce for granted in 2000 and the FP aficionados had a fight ahead of them to convince the mainstream that they aren't just trying to be clever and look smart. And on the topic of teaching, I'll have to point out that LISP has absolutely not been a teaching language across universities around the globe. MIT is not a representative example. Most unis and colleges just stick to what seems to be mainstream (20 years ago: C, C++, Java, ...; today C#, Java, JS..) or just easy to start with (Python) and languages like C and Haskell are now reserved for one-off/in-depth courses about specific topics. If anything, I find it surprising that LISP has as big of a following as it does today, but I guess its (limited) use in teaching plus writings from certain influential people (including the author of this very site) have had their effect. APL by contrast has faced challenges; it was considered too easy to be a teaching language. Other challenges include the symbols, but not because they look scary and alien! We might take the ability to type fancy glyphs for granted today but go back a few decades when computers were using 8-bit character sets, often wired to glass terminals or printers or framebuffers with a hardcoded character set.. you'll start to see the problem. You literally could not enter or view the APL symbols on a lot of computers available at the time. Interoperability with other character sets absolutely was a real challenge and probably alone sufficient to push APL mostly into obscurity for a long time. And indeed this issue was important enough that Iverson moved on from APL to create J. Even this site shows how reluctant people are to accept anything new and alien looking. Almost all postings about APL feature the usual knee jerk reactions to the weird looking syntax, tersity, and symbols. APL and its kin go directly against what's been preached as best practices in programming for so long now that it's not surprising that people are uncomfortable with it. Doubters are not going to judge APL on its merit, because they won't learn it. I think there's a lot to criticize about APL and its ecosystem (let's be clear that due to its relative obscurity, it has missed a lot of the potential evolution and progress that a vibrant community would bring with it), but I think few here are willing to look beneath the surface. Indeed most developers just need a language with mature tooling and libraries and big community, everything else is secondary.
  - ddrdrck_ 5y ago
    >I'll have to point out that LISP has absolutely not been a teaching language across universities around the globe In France Lisp was an essential part of any computer science course at university, and I am pretty sure it is the same today. Same for oCaml. Actually I do not see how you could seriously teach computer science without studying Lisp. Schools that do not teach Lisp but more mainstream languages are not universities, their only objective is to make sure their students find a job at the end of the cursus, not to teach them the fundamental of computer science.
- mlochbaum 5y ago
  If you mean this to be a direct reply to me then you're putting quite a lot of words in my mouth (leephillips is much closer to the position you're arguing against). I don't think the APL language or environment is ideally productive, and I think there are large barriers to adoption and probably wouldn't choose an array language for a commercial project. I made the narrow point that symbols have significant advantages over words—and if you'll go to link I posted you'll find that I also argued that symbols have significant disadvantages as well and shouldn't be used for everything. If I was to consider anything ideally productive it would be my own array language, BQN. Obviously if APL was so good there would be no need to make such a language. Nonetheless I think BQN is far from a perfect array language[0], and that the array paradigm is not a good fit for everything. The feature I miss most is algebraic datatypes or even tagged unions, so there are many contexts where I'd choose a statically-typed language. BQN also (intentionally) makes dictionaries and mutable data harder to work with than other languages, which isn't always a good thing. It's hard to even figure out where to begin with barriers to APL's adoption. Proprietary implementations, storing source code in binary format, lack of publically-accessible documentation? Do note that APL grew rapidly in the late 1970s and by the 80s was close to mainstream. Personally I don't think it has what it takes to become mainstream in the future, but I'm glad that Julia is doing well. There are a few barriers that have largely gone away, which include the total embarrasment of only beginning to switch from Goto to control structures in 1996[1], text encoding problems (there are still some font issues), and difficulty in trying or obtaining Dyalog APL (GNU is not a good substitute: it, uh, doesn't have control structures). In case it's not clear I still think the APL situation is quite a mess, which is why I'm working on BQN. As you've noted, APL is a niche language. Why the need to smack it down? If you're not interested there's no need for you to try it. I advise you to stay away. If you want me to make you interested, I can't. If you're worried APL will take over and force you to use it… well, it won't. [0] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/commentary/problems.html https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/commentary/problems.html [1] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Control_structure#History https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Control_structure#History

civilized 5y ago

If APL is so ideally productive and the barriers to its adoption so substantially slight, why has it not won? The programming community has been extremely open-minded to revolutionary new approaches. So very many have gained at least a foothold and a small group of devotees, from LISP to Haskell to Forth to APL. But none of these languages have built communities of a size and productivity to match Python or C or the many other highly successful Algol-family languages. This despite the fact that some of these off-the-beaten-path languages, especially LISP, have a long history of being used as teaching languages. So why hasn't APL taken off already? Surely there must be a more thoughtful answer than "people are Philistines". Perhaps both APLers and LISPers greatly underestimate the challenges of adopting new symbolic notations that are very different from what they're used to in written language and mathematics. Maybe for the average technical person, the cognitive costs are much greater and the benefits much less than they seem to the average APL or LISP fan.

foxfluff 5y ago
I think it's naive to assume a language would "win" on its own merit. Most of our software today is what it is due to path dependence. Was JavaScript a terrific language? No, it was a little doodle for bringing a little interactivity to websites, which were simple at the time. The web took off; thus JavaScript took off. If the web had never taken off, JS wouldn't be a thing. Same for C. What was so great about C, or its predecessor B? Nothing really. B was a minimal language designed to fit the constraints of a minicomputer. Unix happened, C was a natural evolution of B, Unix took off as a simple & cheap (even free) operating system for cheap computers. C got popular with Unix, and not due to anything revolutionary in its design. C++ rode the OOP hype wave and C's popularity. C#'s popularity is due to Microsoft's massive influence. Java similarly rode the OOP hype train and I guess Sun's marketing towards their many Enterprise customers (who also bought the "write once run anywhere" lie). Remember when PHP was popular? Was that because it was such an awesome language, or was it because it seemed easy and integrated well with this other popular thing that took off (the web)? (On a similar note, it's not clear at all that Linux would have become as popular as it is today if it weren't for the lawsuits looming over the BSDs in the 90s) Of course I'm oversimplifying and glossing over a lot of history but in the decades between Unix and C#, there have been countless programming languages that could have easily challenged each language that I named on their own merit. But that merit does not matter, because that's not what makes a language take off. If anything, the programming community seems rather reluctant to consider different approaches, and when they do it, they would rather do it in the comfort of their existing languages and ecosystem of tools & libraries rather than jump to something new entirely. Lisp and Haskell never got mainstream despite their use in teaching, but I think most of the programming community today sees the value in functional thinking and immutability; thus various constructs that have been historically exclusive to functional programming languages have made it into mainstream languages. You couldn't take lambdas and map & reduce for granted in 2000 and the FP aficionados had a fight ahead of them to convince the mainstream that they aren't just trying to be clever and look smart. And on the topic of teaching, I'll have to point out that LISP has absolutely not been a teaching language across universities around the globe. MIT is not a representative example. Most unis and colleges just stick to what seems to be mainstream (20 years ago: C, C++, Java, ...; today C#, Java, JS..) or just easy to start with (Python) and languages like C and Haskell are now reserved for one-off/in-depth courses about specific topics. If anything, I find it surprising that LISP has as big of a following as it does today, but I guess its (limited) use in teaching plus writings from certain influential people (including the author of this very site) have had their effect. APL by contrast has faced challenges; it was considered too easy to be a teaching language. Other challenges include the symbols, but not because they look scary and alien! We might take the ability to type fancy glyphs for granted today but go back a few decades when computers were using 8-bit character sets, often wired to glass terminals or printers or framebuffers with a hardcoded character set.. you'll start to see the problem. You literally could not enter or view the APL symbols on a lot of computers available at the time. Interoperability with other character sets absolutely was a real challenge and probably alone sufficient to push APL mostly into obscurity for a long time. And indeed this issue was important enough that Iverson moved on from APL to create J. Even this site shows how reluctant people are to accept anything new and alien looking. Almost all postings about APL feature the usual knee jerk reactions to the weird looking syntax, tersity, and symbols. APL and its kin go directly against what's been preached as best practices in programming for so long now that it's not surprising that people are uncomfortable with it. Doubters are not going to judge APL on its merit, because they won't learn it. I think there's a lot to criticize about APL and its ecosystem (let's be clear that due to its relative obscurity, it has missed a lot of the potential evolution and progress that a vibrant community would bring with it), but I think few here are willing to look beneath the surface. Indeed most developers just need a language with mature tooling and libraries and big community, everything else is secondary.
- ddrdrck_ 5y ago
  >I'll have to point out that LISP has absolutely not been a teaching language across universities around the globe In France Lisp was an essential part of any computer science course at university, and I am pretty sure it is the same today. Same for oCaml. Actually I do not see how you could seriously teach computer science without studying Lisp. Schools that do not teach Lisp but more mainstream languages are not universities, their only objective is to make sure their students find a job at the end of the cursus, not to teach them the fundamental of computer science.
mlochbaum 5y ago
If you mean this to be a direct reply to me then you're putting quite a lot of words in my mouth (leephillips is much closer to the position you're arguing against). I don't think the APL language or environment is ideally productive, and I think there are large barriers to adoption and probably wouldn't choose an array language for a commercial project. I made the narrow point that symbols have significant advantages over words—and if you'll go to link I posted you'll find that I also argued that symbols have significant disadvantages as well and shouldn't be used for everything. If I was to consider anything ideally productive it would be my own array language, BQN. Obviously if APL was so good there would be no need to make such a language. Nonetheless I think BQN is far from a perfect array language[0], and that the array paradigm is not a good fit for everything. The feature I miss most is algebraic datatypes or even tagged unions, so there are many contexts where I'd choose a statically-typed language. BQN also (intentionally) makes dictionaries and mutable data harder to work with than other languages, which isn't always a good thing. It's hard to even figure out where to begin with barriers to APL's adoption. Proprietary implementations, storing source code in binary format, lack of publically-accessible documentation? Do note that APL grew rapidly in the late 1970s and by the 80s was close to mainstream. Personally I don't think it has what it takes to become mainstream in the future, but I'm glad that Julia is doing well. There are a few barriers that have largely gone away, which include the total embarrasment of only beginning to switch from Goto to control structures in 1996[1], text encoding problems (there are still some font issues), and difficulty in trying or obtaining Dyalog APL (GNU is not a good substitute: it, uh, doesn't have control structures). In case it's not clear I still think the APL situation is quite a mess, which is why I'm working on BQN. As you've noted, APL is a niche language. Why the need to smack it down? If you're not interested there's no need for you to try it. I advise you to stay away. If you want me to make you interested, I can't. If you're worried APL will take over and force you to use it… well, it won't. [0] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/commentary/problems.html https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/commentary/problems.html [1] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Control_structure#History https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Control_structure#History