5 ms·

APL made a lot more sense in an era of 110 baud teletypes when brevity of a programming language was vastly more important than it is today.

lmm 4y ago
The human mind is one of the few things whose bandwidth hasn't increased since then. APL still makes sense.
- robomartin 4y ago
  As someone who actually used APL professionally for ten years, I’ll say APL does not make sense today outside of being a valuable academic tool. A next generation APL might make sense. No, it isn’t J. That’s an abomination. I have written about this on HN in the past.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Apparently many finance institutions are of another opinion, given how many array languages happen to survive on that space. Additionally these kind of languages are much more ergonomic for GPPGU, and I expect them to eventually get more adoption into that space.
    - robomartin 4y ago
      Financial institutions have codebases going back decades. In some cases they are stuck with decisions made long ago. That’s just about the only place you might find APL these days. Go to a job site and search for APL jobs to get a sense of what reality looks like in the APL world.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        There is more to array languages that only APL, besides if one wants to find a job in a niche domain, job boards aren't the way to find them, rather user groups and conferences. https://www.arraycast.com/ https://www.arraycast.com/ https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conferences_and_activities https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conferences_and_activities Many people are more than happy working on a niche field, not everything has to be career scale.
        steveBK123 4y ago
        FAANG bias here on HN, but financial tech is orders of magnitude leaner in general. K's are often used as a sort of efficiency language. Often allows you to get the same work done in 1/1000th the code managed by 1/10th the staff running on 1/10th the hardware. Anyway, these things are cyclical.
      - abrudz 4y ago
        Lots of financial institutions at https://github.com/interregna/arraylanguage-companies https://github.com/interregna/arraylanguage-companies but plenty of others too. (And that's a hobbyist-created list; not at all exhaustive.)
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    As someone who has spent quite some time developing a new APL dialect (with plenty of features that are not normally found in APL dialects), I'd love to hear more about what you'd like to see improved.
    - robomartin 4y ago
      Notation is important and incredibly valuable. If you are abandoning notation, as J did, that’s a mistake. If you search for APL and my username in HN you should be able to find opinions on this going back several years.
      - mlajtos 4y ago
        Is this the thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461338
        tluyben2 4y ago
        That is an interesting read, although everyone seemed to be slightly hostile instead of openly discussing. I don't prefer J, even over APL; I find it not very well designed as a tool of thought. I do like some k's though; they more naturally feel like an ascii version of k. I think Arthur has a better feel for the ergonomics of verbose languages. I like BQN so far, but need to do something large-ish with it. I also like Klong, especially because Nils wrote a nice and easy to follow book about it. But it's not really a language with a community. I think anyone interested in this kind of thing should just intern one of them ; you basically need so see every compute problem as an array problem and immediately see patterns for how to solve them. The 'gibberish' (as programmers not used to these kind of languages see it) is typically not written char for char, but the experienced programmer has idioms; when they encounter a problem seen before, an entire 'function' plops out, often shorter than a function performing the same task in another programming language would be name. Once there, the other ones are kind of more of the same. It's not very different from the first encounter with haskell or lisp or something; if you are not proficient, you won't see the advantage (or even think people using it are not totally sane).

lmm 4y ago

The human mind is one of the few things whose bandwidth hasn't increased since then. APL still makes sense.

robomartin 4y ago
As someone who actually used APL professionally for ten years, I’ll say APL does not make sense today outside of being a valuable academic tool. A next generation APL might make sense. No, it isn’t J. That’s an abomination. I have written about this on HN in the past.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Apparently many finance institutions are of another opinion, given how many array languages happen to survive on that space. Additionally these kind of languages are much more ergonomic for GPPGU, and I expect them to eventually get more adoption into that space.
  - robomartin 4y ago
    Financial institutions have codebases going back decades. In some cases they are stuck with decisions made long ago. That’s just about the only place you might find APL these days. Go to a job site and search for APL jobs to get a sense of what reality looks like in the APL world.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      There is more to array languages that only APL, besides if one wants to find a job in a niche domain, job boards aren't the way to find them, rather user groups and conferences. https://www.arraycast.com/ https://www.arraycast.com/ https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conferences_and_activities https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conferences_and_activities Many people are more than happy working on a niche field, not everything has to be career scale.
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        FAANG bias here on HN, but financial tech is orders of magnitude leaner in general. K's are often used as a sort of efficiency language. Often allows you to get the same work done in 1/1000th the code managed by 1/10th the staff running on 1/10th the hardware. Anyway, these things are cyclical.
    - abrudz 4y ago
      Lots of financial institutions at https://github.com/interregna/arraylanguage-companies https://github.com/interregna/arraylanguage-companies but plenty of others too. (And that's a hobbyist-created list; not at all exhaustive.)
- lokedhs 4y ago
  As someone who has spent quite some time developing a new APL dialect (with plenty of features that are not normally found in APL dialects), I'd love to hear more about what you'd like to see improved.
  - robomartin 4y ago
    Notation is important and incredibly valuable. If you are abandoning notation, as J did, that’s a mistake. If you search for APL and my username in HN you should be able to find opinions on this going back several years.
    - mlajtos 4y ago
      Is this the thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461338
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        That is an interesting read, although everyone seemed to be slightly hostile instead of openly discussing. I don't prefer J, even over APL; I find it not very well designed as a tool of thought. I do like some k's though; they more naturally feel like an ascii version of k. I think Arthur has a better feel for the ergonomics of verbose languages. I like BQN so far, but need to do something large-ish with it. I also like Klong, especially because Nils wrote a nice and easy to follow book about it. But it's not really a language with a community. I think anyone interested in this kind of thing should just intern one of them ; you basically need so see every compute problem as an array problem and immediately see patterns for how to solve them. The 'gibberish' (as programmers not used to these kind of languages see it) is typically not written char for char, but the experienced programmer has idioms; when they encounter a problem seen before, an entire 'function' plops out, often shorter than a function performing the same task in another programming language would be name. Once there, the other ones are kind of more of the same. It's not very different from the first encounter with haskell or lisp or something; if you are not proficient, you won't see the advantage (or even think people using it are not totally sane).