Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages (2013)

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

31 pointslelf8 comments

What's changed since the last time this was posted: APL is now generally free. J[1] is GPL. The newest version of k is closed-source, but still freely available for personal use from shakti[2], and there is also an independent AGPL implementation[3]. Dyalog APL[4] is closed-source but free for personal use; and, finally, GNU APL[5] has always been open-source, but it's matured quite a bit. Whatever your choice, you have a freely usable option.

1: https://www.jsoftware.com/

2: https://shakti.com/

3: https://bitbucket.org/ngn/k/src/master/

4: https://www.dyalog.com/

5: https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/

For anyone with even the slightest curiosity or desire to learn APL:

Please check out J!

J's "labs" feature is probably the single greatest resource for learning APL there is right now, aside from being instructed in person. Some of them in the current versions of J are even from Ken Iverson, one of the most brilliant people to have influenced computer science, Turing Award winner, former Harvard professor, and of course, the person who first brought APL to the rest of the world. Most of the new ones were written by people who are also brilliant.

There are even iOS and Android apps if you have bits and pieces of free time that aren't really suited to taking out your laptop or desktop, and they're fully-featured, including a web server, the stuff needed for dataviz, labs, everything, really.

There is also kona which is a older version of K but still very usable. You can find an overview of the different free and non-free versions of K here:

https://ngn.bitbucket.io/k.html

A very nice introduction for mere mortals to J is here:

Fly Straight, Dammit!

http://www.petecorey.com/blog/2019/08/12/fly-straight-dammit...

and here:

A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language

https://web.archive.org/web/20130801233812/http://www.kuro5h...

A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707075

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6115727

The comments are descriptive.

Added to my bookmarks, thanks. I especially respect the guy after he lashed out at the PC virtue signaller in the comments. How insufferable do people need to get to bitch about gender in an article about programming languages?

Really respectable, to claim not to want "oversensitive swine" reading his work and in the same thread to be so offended by a comment about his use of language as to reply with

> You may now go fuck yourself with a carrot scraper in whatever gender-free orifice you have available.

Regardless of belief about the appropriateness of phrases like 'real men', I reserve my respect for people that don't resort to dehumanizing name-calling at the insinuation that they may have said something wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com