Dyalog APL 16.0 | Hacker News Reader

Dyalog APL 16.0

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65 pointssndean16 comments

I like it that they are adding more and more functionalities from J, probably because Roger Hui is involved in this. The namespace system in Dyalog APL works far better than J's locale, IMHO.

The only problem is that you can't get the source code. Look around, in this 21st century, how many interpreters are still closed sourced? I really worry about their long term survivability.

> I really worry about their long term survivability.

Me too. It's a relief that GNU APL has become a viable alternative, in case Dyalog goes under.

Do you use GNU APL? I talked to the maintainer once, but not aware of its speed and maturity.

I've only used it enough to see that majority of the code I write in Dyalog APL will run there as well. Perhaps I should start in GNU APL in the first place, but Dyalog's environment is just nicer

Yea, good point. The libraries appear to be fairly good at least (ODBC, DDE, plots, R interface...etc).

Closed source is less of a problem for me than the draconian licensing. Paying such steep costs to use in production is a no go for me. I could afford the $1500 personal productivity tool fee for just myself, but then none of my coworkers can use anything I write which probably doesn't help advertising. I really like the symbols more than J, but J ends up being more practical for me. I think if array langs are to take off, kx systems would have to make their software free and just charge for support, but I doubt they'll do that with how much money they're making.

I still don't get the companies that cannot take the lessons of Smalltalk vendors. It's no accident Borland could sell product and Smalltalk vendors died off with developer and deployment fees.

I still think there is a place for paid tools, but more JetBrain / old Borland then ParcPlace.

Yea. Ain't nobody wanna pay a deployment fee. Visual Studio charges for the IDE as I understand it which you don't even have to use.

I really like Dyalog. I paid for the personal license before they made it free, but then when I thought about developing things for fun, and possibly commercial reasons, the licensing put me off. I still play with Dyalog, but J is the better fit for my needs right now. I am glad Roger Hui is on board, and I hope it does the same thing J did, and open source the code. I have a fondness for the characters in APL for no real objective reason. Maybe my love of symbols to make things concise and in one eyeful.

Yea, I use a lot of symbols in my emails (obviously nothing like APL), but enough for me to realize I like that kind of notation.

On a side note, the latest J 806 beta finally includes support for AVX. Let's see how this will impact the performance.

I skimmed the Wikipedia article on AVX, but have no clue what it means. Care to go into a little more detail? Targeting the additional instructions will slow things down you think?

AVX are vector instructions. They work on wide register (256bit) where you can stuff 8 32bit floats (or in later versions ints) or 4 (double, or longs not sure if AVX2 or later has support for that), or 16 chars (AVX2 iirc).

APL, as an array language, should, in theory at least, especially profit from automatic vectorization by the compiler. If the auto-vectorization works well, you get get a 4-16x speed-up for free (if you don't have data dependencies).

Well that sounds amazing!

I love APL, used it professionally for about a decade.

I hate the APL ecosystem.

That seems to be about right. I really wish there was a decently maintained, open source, apl derivative with the source on GitHub. The nearest I could find was Kona but it looks like that has pretty minimal activity. It seems like anyone with the ability to make this a reality just creates a new variants , closes the source, and charges for the tooling (like Kerf).

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