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"Who uses APL in production?" is a common question. These days, it's mostly those who haven't stopped using it. The historical use, while never quite mainstream
by mlochbaum 3y ago
"Who uses APL in production?" is a common question. These days, it's mostly those who haven't stopped using it. The historical use, while never quite mainstream, might be surprising to those who never realized APL had a commercial presence at all!
- APL conferences were held every year from 1969 to 2004, minus '77 and '78 due to some unfortunate logistical issues (certainly not lack of demand). Conferences in the 80s regularly had >1000 in attendance despite both IPSA and STSC holding their own many years. My count (may not entirely rule out duplicates) is >1000 paper authors, and far more papers were submitted than accepted. https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_conference https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_conference
- At least a dozen hardware manufacturers implemented an APL for their systems in the mainframe and minicomputer era (70s and 80s): https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Vendors https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Vendors
- Usage stats from just one university in 1978: 7,300 active accounts and 5,400 workspaces (which would each store an individual project, or something like that). Used for all sorts of administration and even a student ride sharing service. Today of course, much of this would be done in Excel. https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Syracuse_University https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Syracuse_University
- The first serious e-mail system was implemented in APL in 1972, and used by Jimmy Carter in 1976 for his presidential campaign: https://forums.dyalog.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1629 https://forums.dyalog.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1629
- I've heard but can't verify that one of the APL books (Gilman and Rose maybe) sold over 100,000 copies.
- bloaf 3y agoI've seen APL in use in industry for industrial simulation tools. I thought it was a pretty cool technical decision because of how good APL is at exactly the kind of vector math they were doing (I even offered to join their team just for a chance to learn APL.) Unfortunately, they were a little too excited about APL and went and built a bunch of APL GUIs on top of their simulations, which were giving them huge maintenance headaches.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI'm not a big fan of complicated GUIs or practically any GUIs to be honest. Their complexity is vast and code wise, they often make up a majority or at least very significant part of an application. I get it if you're selling a product, but if it's just an internal tool, I find it's usually just not worth it in the long run.
- bloaf 3y agoThis is literally why VBA+excel are so pervasive: it’s a way to slap together a UI with no/minimal code. There is a vision of a future where non-CS engineers could function with an interface that’s basically a Jupiter notebook with “import simulator” at the top, but managers are loathe to make that level of scripting competence a requirement for an already fairly specialized role.
- p_l 3y agoExcel combined with APIs and either minimal VBA or COM AddIns is also perfect method to do random data entry or query interfaces for your end users if you have MS Office on Windows as your common office platform.
- calvinmorrison 3y agoIt's the perfect use case for calling out to a library. When I worked in a research lab, we had a ton of math functions written in Fortran by old white beards that were great - plus we could call them from C, or Python or whatever. I could imagine writing some hard math core functionality in APL then wrapping it up
- lenkite 3y agoDoes APL have any advantages in data-science/analysis over R/Python-Pandas ?
- cianigga 3y ago[dead]