4 ms·

To be fair, "lines of code written" is a particularly poor choice of denominator when discussing APL. But I think you're also unaware of historical usage. There

To be fair, "lines of code written" is a particularly poor choice of denominator when discussing APL. But I think you're also unaware of historical usage. There are some very large (I believe close to a million lines) financial applications still in use, and far more applications for ordinary tasks like scheduling, payroll, and other administration made for companies and universities in the 80s. Now that the ACM has made them free to access, papers from the APL conference are a good place to look to get a sense for this; APL79 was the first really huge one: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_conference#1979 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_conference#1979

zetalyrae 4y ago
I'm aware of kdb+. It has an SQL interface and clients in multiple languages. How many of their users use the APL interface? And how many financial companies are planning on building new products on top of a technological dead-end from the 1960's? There was a time when APL was taught in universities, and some computers came with APL-specialized keyboards. That time came and went because the bulk of mainstream software development went in a wildly different direction.
- andylynch 4y ago
  Plenty. The sql-like interface (in Q) is mostly syntactic sugar; the functional style takes you much further. That said KX is making a huge push on ease of use and front end where you don’t necessarily need to use Q.
- mlochbaum 4y ago
  For clarity, I'm talking mainly about SimCorp[0], which is a user of Dyalog APL, not kdb. The core of Dimension uses APL (with many other parts in C#), and there's a separate APL product bought with APL Italiana as well. They employ hundreds of APL programmers, preferring to hire math and physics majors out of college because they're easier to teach. Yes, SimCorp probably wouldn't start with APL today, and I wouldn't give it a second thought either if I were trying to start a big business. I pointed to the large codebases because they're easier to quantify, but I'm sure there are millions of lines written by hobbyist developers. I know you're not trying to flame, but what you've given us so far is a false claim that nobody writes code in APL, and a bare assertion that APL is a bad way to program. On that note, you're trying to say a language you've never used doesn't allow for "abstraction" or "a focus on readability", which I think is dead wrong. All of which is at best tangentially relevant to Iverson's claim in the paper (not APL's founding document, by the way; that would be A Programming Language) that APL's notation is a way to enhance your thinking. APL has good and bad aspects, and there's a lot to discuss, but can it please be a discussion instead of these careless remarks? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCorp

zetalyrae 4y ago

I'm aware of kdb+. It has an SQL interface and clients in multiple languages. How many of their users use the APL interface? And how many financial companies are planning on building new products on top of a technological dead-end from the 1960's? There was a time when APL was taught in universities, and some computers came with APL-specialized keyboards. That time came and went because the bulk of mainstream software development went in a wildly different direction.

andylynch 4y ago
Plenty. The sql-like interface (in Q) is mostly syntactic sugar; the functional style takes you much further. That said KX is making a huge push on ease of use and front end where you don’t necessarily need to use Q.
mlochbaum 4y ago
For clarity, I'm talking mainly about SimCorp[0], which is a user of Dyalog APL, not kdb. The core of Dimension uses APL (with many other parts in C#), and there's a separate APL product bought with APL Italiana as well. They employ hundreds of APL programmers, preferring to hire math and physics majors out of college because they're easier to teach. Yes, SimCorp probably wouldn't start with APL today, and I wouldn't give it a second thought either if I were trying to start a big business. I pointed to the large codebases because they're easier to quantify, but I'm sure there are millions of lines written by hobbyist developers. I know you're not trying to flame, but what you've given us so far is a false claim that nobody writes code in APL, and a bare assertion that APL is a bad way to program. On that note, you're trying to say a language you've never used doesn't allow for "abstraction" or "a focus on readability", which I think is dead wrong. All of which is at best tangentially relevant to Iverson's claim in the paper (not APL's founding document, by the way; that would be A Programming Language) that APL's notation is a way to enhance your thinking. APL has good and bad aspects, and there's a lot to discuss, but can it please be a discussion instead of these careless remarks? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCorp