7 ms·

GNU APL 1.3

122 points by lelf 13y ago

gfosco 13y ago
My favorite example of APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
- notimetorelax 13y ago
  I'm quite amazed how the author has not made any mistake in the presentation. I wonder if using APL leads to a different state of mind where tool is out of your way or was it simply a well rehearsed demo?
  - X4 13y ago
    My prof also writes complex APL code live and I've never seen a program he made that didn't run or had a bug. He has a I ❤ APL sticker on his laptop. And he is a god damn genius, we can't compare us to him in absolutely no, no way. It doesn't lead to a different state of mind, that guy was already born a genius a little like rainman, but without the downsides. He switched to J after I showed him that a few years ago and is ever happy since. He told me that he paid about 2000bucks for his APL compiler back then.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    It does. I programmed in an APL 'derivative' (Q) for a while, it's quite easy to get the hang of it. The problem is that it's write only.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona Kona is free and would give people a flavour of this style of programming (minus the database tools). http://www.jsoftware.com/ http://www.jsoftware.com/ J is mentioned by another poster below (EDIT) Grandparent post: if you are half a bagel and a housebrick, this stuff makes me feel like a few grains of sand and a peanut.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 13y ago
    I suspect it was mostly the later. ;) Nonetheless, because array programming requires unorthodox input and is sufficiently different than popular paradigms, authors typically write slower which may explain the deliberateness.
- etfb 13y ago
  It's official. I am a total gumby. There are minds out there that are to mine as the entire city of New York is to a house brick and half a bagel. And they're all using APL.
- RBerenguel 13y ago
  Love it, too. I used the vector-recurse-eval trick for drawing a Mandelbrot set in APL (Gnu APL, specifically)
srean 13y ago
So does this require special a keyboard ? How does inputting those special symbols work. Are APL's typically JITed ?
- gfosco 13y ago
  You can use a standard keyboard, if you learn the mapping or get key caps. http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif
- fafner 13y ago
  > Are APL's typically JITed ? No.
DonGateley 13y ago
This would be cool if you weren't required to be a build tools dojo to use it. Windows binary please! Complete working stand alone binary. Then it might make an impact.
- gfosco 13y ago
  They distribute a 32-bit .exe of APL that should run under Cygwin. ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/apl/apl.exe
  - DonGateley 13y ago
    Hmmm, I just looked up Cygwin to see what it is and what I learned is that the barrier to using GNU APL is too high for me with the time and knowledge I have available. I'll bet that's true for a whole lot of other people that would otherwise benefit from APL. I just hope that someone outside of GNU APL with the ability to make a normal Windows install package isn't as enamored with Windows barriers and would like to see APL proceed. And I hope the GNU license restrictions allow for that.
    - avmich 13y ago
      May be you can be interested in learning J? jsoftware.com has a nice installer for it, very few dependencies, small package. And I believe Ken Iverson thought J could be more logical than APL - in some aspects, which were learned while developing APL.
- leoc 13y ago
  Core GNU seems to often be quite passive-aggressive about its Windows support.
  - _quasimodo 13y ago
    I think it's part of their philosophy. They don't want to encourage people to use a non-free operating system. edit: also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work
wyc 13y ago
If you're interested in getting a taste of APL while keeping in ASCII, you might want to check out the J programming language. Ken Iverson (the creator of APL) had a hand in its development. J implements most APL operators and is sometimes known as its successor, along with K and Q. Get started here: http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm This family of languages really leads to a new way of thinking, evident in the J incunabulum (the C interpreter that started J, purportedly written in one afternoon) [1]. The code looks really dense and borderline gibberish at first glance, but I found it very expressive after a good read. [1]: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum
- bjz_ 13y ago
  Tracy Harms did a talk at Strange Loop about J: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language
- minikomi 13y ago
  Whenever APL and it's ilk are discussed I tend to wonder, other than project Euler, what are good "little problems" to start getting your feet wet?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 13y ago
    Most business school problems (e.g. linear programming) are easily translatable.
  - kd0amg 13y ago
    I liked redoing my machine learning homework in J.
  - avmich 13y ago
    I decided once to write a C preprocessor in a clean C. Some weeks and 5000 lines of code later, I had many features of it done except functional macro resolution. By that time I've got substantially tired with manual memory management. So I shelved the project. Then I started learning J, and after some time decided to implement a project in it. After some months I've got working an LR parser generator. I've got so impressed with J convenience - the whole thing was about 700 lines, majority of that was comments and I was writing really simple J, as I was just learning it. You can check out some preliminary notes about parser generator building (only the beginning of the process) here - http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing . I think J could be much better - by certain criteria - suited for many real projects. And I have other examples as well.
sbmassey 13y ago
APL and vim have a similar outlook in that they both give their users a set of simple, easy to apply, and composable functions, that can then be used, in the hands of experts, to manipulate their underlying data structures with awesome suppleness.
- bsg75 13y ago
  Watching the vid linked by gfosco I was wondering this myself. It is an interesting comparison.
derwildemomo 13y ago
Am I the only one who thought they just released an updated version of a license?
- sadris 13y ago
  That's what I was thinking (confused) until I read your comment...
davorb 13y ago
Just in case anyone is interested, Unicomp is still selling APL-keyboards and keys (for Model-Ms). http://pckeyboard.com http://pckeyboard.com
- protomyth 13y ago
  direct link http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET
brudgers 13y ago
About Ken Iverson, author of APL, who was at age 84, working on J when hit by a fatal stroke: Ken didn’t get tenure at Harvard. He did his five years as an assistant professor and the Faculty decided not to put him up for promotion. I asked him what went wrong and he said, “Well, the Dean called me in and said, ‘the trouble is, you haven’t published anything but the one little book’”. The one little book later got [him] the Turing Award.: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/#A-Short-Biography-of-Ken-Iverson http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-lan...
mjn 13y ago
Very interesting. I didn't know a GNU APL existed. Looks like it's a quite recent, from-scratch implementation mainly by one author, with its first release only a few months ago, in September 2013: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-09/msg00014.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-09/msg00014.... The author, Jürgen Sauermann, doesn't seem to have a web-presence; would be curious what else he's up to, besides singlehandedly launching a new APL implementation. Is it a hobby project? Motivated by an existing APL codebase? Part of a research project? He must have quite some experience with APL, since he wrote a PhD thesis on a parallel APL system 25 years ago: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307 http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307
webkike 13y ago
At first I thought this was referring to the Affero Public License, and thus was extremely confused.
baruchel 13y ago
You can try GNU APL 1.3 with my online compiled-to-javascript version (I used emscripten for compiling it): http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/ http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/ The page is customizable with 5 colours: try http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F3F3F3D7D5D5 http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F... (you will probably need to force reloading the page) or http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF5AB0EB5B8BF http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF... (choice of 5 colors from Adobe Kuler website).

GNU APL 1.3

122 points by lelf 13y ago

gfosco 13y ago

My favorite example of APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

notimetorelax 13y ago
I'm quite amazed how the author has not made any mistake in the presentation. I wonder if using APL leads to a different state of mind where tool is out of your way or was it simply a well rehearsed demo?
- X4 13y ago
  My prof also writes complex APL code live and I've never seen a program he made that didn't run or had a bug. He has a I ❤ APL sticker on his laptop. And he is a god damn genius, we can't compare us to him in absolutely no, no way. It doesn't lead to a different state of mind, that guy was already born a genius a little like rainman, but without the downsides. He switched to J after I showed him that a few years ago and is ever happy since. He told me that he paid about 2000bucks for his APL compiler back then.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  It does. I programmed in an APL 'derivative' (Q) for a while, it's quite easy to get the hang of it. The problem is that it's write only.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona Kona is free and would give people a flavour of this style of programming (minus the database tools). http://www.jsoftware.com/ http://www.jsoftware.com/ J is mentioned by another poster below (EDIT) Grandparent post: if you are half a bagel and a housebrick, this stuff makes me feel like a few grains of sand and a peanut.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 13y ago
  I suspect it was mostly the later. ;) Nonetheless, because array programming requires unorthodox input and is sufficiently different than popular paradigms, authors typically write slower which may explain the deliberateness.
etfb 13y ago
It's official. I am a total gumby. There are minds out there that are to mine as the entire city of New York is to a house brick and half a bagel. And they're all using APL.
RBerenguel 13y ago
Love it, too. I used the vector-recurse-eval trick for drawing a Mandelbrot set in APL (Gnu APL, specifically)

srean 13y ago

So does this require special a keyboard ? How does inputting those special symbols work. Are APL's typically JITed ?

gfosco 13y ago
You can use a standard keyboard, if you learn the mapping or get key caps. http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif
fafner 13y ago
> Are APL's typically JITed ? No.

DonGateley 13y ago

This would be cool if you weren't required to be a build tools dojo to use it. Windows binary please! Complete working stand alone binary. Then it might make an impact.

gfosco 13y ago
They distribute a 32-bit .exe of APL that should run under Cygwin. ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/apl/apl.exe
- DonGateley 13y ago
  Hmmm, I just looked up Cygwin to see what it is and what I learned is that the barrier to using GNU APL is too high for me with the time and knowledge I have available. I'll bet that's true for a whole lot of other people that would otherwise benefit from APL. I just hope that someone outside of GNU APL with the ability to make a normal Windows install package isn't as enamored with Windows barriers and would like to see APL proceed. And I hope the GNU license restrictions allow for that.
  - avmich 13y ago
    May be you can be interested in learning J? jsoftware.com has a nice installer for it, very few dependencies, small package. And I believe Ken Iverson thought J could be more logical than APL - in some aspects, which were learned while developing APL.
leoc 13y ago
Core GNU seems to often be quite passive-aggressive about its Windows support.
- _quasimodo 13y ago
  I think it's part of their philosophy. They don't want to encourage people to use a non-free operating system. edit: also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

wyc 13y ago

If you're interested in getting a taste of APL while keeping in ASCII, you might want to check out the J programming language. Ken Iverson (the creator of APL) had a hand in its development. J implements most APL operators and is sometimes known as its successor, along with K and Q. Get started here: http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm This family of languages really leads to a new way of thinking, evident in the J incunabulum (the C interpreter that started J, purportedly written in one afternoon) [1]. The code looks really dense and borderline gibberish at first glance, but I found it very expressive after a good read. [1]: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum

bjz_ 13y ago
Tracy Harms did a talk at Strange Loop about J: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language
minikomi 13y ago
Whenever APL and it's ilk are discussed I tend to wonder, other than project Euler, what are good "little problems" to start getting your feet wet?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 13y ago
  Most business school problems (e.g. linear programming) are easily translatable.
- kd0amg 13y ago
  I liked redoing my machine learning homework in J.
- avmich 13y ago
  I decided once to write a C preprocessor in a clean C. Some weeks and 5000 lines of code later, I had many features of it done except functional macro resolution. By that time I've got substantially tired with manual memory management. So I shelved the project. Then I started learning J, and after some time decided to implement a project in it. After some months I've got working an LR parser generator. I've got so impressed with J convenience - the whole thing was about 700 lines, majority of that was comments and I was writing really simple J, as I was just learning it. You can check out some preliminary notes about parser generator building (only the beginning of the process) here - http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing . I think J could be much better - by certain criteria - suited for many real projects. And I have other examples as well.

sbmassey 13y ago

APL and vim have a similar outlook in that they both give their users a set of simple, easy to apply, and composable functions, that can then be used, in the hands of experts, to manipulate their underlying data structures with awesome suppleness.

bsg75 13y ago
Watching the vid linked by gfosco I was wondering this myself. It is an interesting comparison.

derwildemomo 13y ago

Am I the only one who thought they just released an updated version of a license?

sadris 13y ago
That's what I was thinking (confused) until I read your comment...

davorb 13y ago

Just in case anyone is interested, Unicomp is still selling APL-keyboards and keys (for Model-Ms). http://pckeyboard.com http://pckeyboard.com

protomyth 13y ago
direct link http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET

brudgers 13y ago

About Ken Iverson, author of APL, who was at age 84, working on J when hit by a fatal stroke: Ken didn’t get tenure at Harvard. He did his five years as an assistant professor and the Faculty decided not to put him up for promotion. I asked him what went wrong and he said, “Well, the Dean called me in and said, ‘the trouble is, you haven’t published anything but the one little book’”. The one little book later got [him] the Turing Award.: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/#A-Short-Biography-of-Ken-Iverson http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-lan...

mjn 13y ago

Very interesting. I didn't know a GNU APL existed. Looks like it's a quite recent, from-scratch implementation mainly by one author, with its first release only a few months ago, in September 2013: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-09/msg00014.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-09/msg00014.... The author, Jürgen Sauermann, doesn't seem to have a web-presence; would be curious what else he's up to, besides singlehandedly launching a new APL implementation. Is it a hobby project? Motivated by an existing APL codebase? Part of a research project? He must have quite some experience with APL, since he wrote a PhD thesis on a parallel APL system 25 years ago: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307 http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307

webkike 13y ago

At first I thought this was referring to the Affero Public License, and thus was extremely confused.

baruchel 13y ago

You can try GNU APL 1.3 with my online compiled-to-javascript version (I used emscripten for compiling it): http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/ http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/ The page is customizable with 5 colours: try http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F3F3F3D7D5D5 http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F... (you will probably need to force reloading the page) or http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF5AB0EB5B8BF http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF... (choice of 5 colors from Adobe Kuler website).