3 ms·

This is neat. I studied APL recently (through Ted Nelson's fantastic intro in Computer Lib), and ever since I've been intrigued by some of the neat ideas/concis

• kaoD 13y ago
  Check out J[1]. It's basically ASCII-APL though it lacks a toy modern implementation (in case you don't know, APL has one[2]). What really annoyed me about array languages is that idiomatic code is nearly impossible to follow after a month, so I ended up aliasing many of the commands to more verbose alternatives and using longer traditional constructs like IF-THEN-ELSE. That pretty much turned the language into weird-C-limited-to-binary-functions-with-an-array-stdlib, which kind of defeated the point. [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/ [2] https://github.com/ngn/apl
• X4 13y ago
  Oh My God.. I tried to learn APL for about two days some years ago and all I gorked was just basic stuff. Then I found out J and recommended that to our APL loving Prof. who converted from his about $2000 expensive prorietary APL symbolic minfu to the free J alternative. I could write much more with J, but Julia still feels more natural. I've not made any speed comparisons, but maybe you can give APL, J, Julia and SAC a bench? That would be neat! A simple hello world like example, for example using the same FFT algorithm, or "addition" loop would be enough.