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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

You ever try the modern Dyalog offering with .NET, SQL, and R interop? Pretty cool stuff although I don't really use the language. There is a guy here writing a compiler for Dyalog APL that runs on a GPU, but is only a few pages of APL. If that isn't the future, I don't know what is.

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No, I haven't sorry. I agree with the other comment in that APL, if it is to go anywhere, needs to be open sourced. I'll go beyond that and say that what we need is a new iteration of APL that addresses all the issues with a language that is now at least 30 years away from its most active and innovative period. That's a tall order. I can see getting into something like that as a retirement project. Way too much other good stuff to do now.

That'd be a nice project. It's not APL, but I wanted to add that Perl6 has some APL features such as letting you define custom operators using any Unicode symbol you like, so you could technically write an APL language on top really easily. I wonder if more APL features will pop up in other languages in the future.

I also think it's the future, the problem is that I don't believe that Dyalog APL is the future, even though it's really nice. It just should be opensource to succeed imho., why still be so greedy and take money for a language. Also the IDE is really weird. I love APL and J, but I think there is a lot of space for improvement. And I want that improvement to happen in the open. They can still charge for Consulting, Hosting whatnot.

I'm curious if it would be so nice as a non-commercial project. I suppose some companies would still pay for support and development.

You mean a funding model similar to FreeBSD, right? With the right partnerships this could indeed work very well. At a time where even Microsoft opensources their compilers, Dyalog keeping theirs from the ~70s closed is mind bending to me.

And I agree, I would pay, even if it's not that much. The commercial license comes with a too steep price tag. I'd rather opensource my code or contribute where I can.

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