Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

082349872349872

It's at least reassuring to learn from the 1952-1954 section that the phenomenon of doing things without having any clue about them easily predates the microprocessor.

(btw I second the recommendation of the 1962 A Programming Language)

Edit:

> The third page had an illustration that, in a few short lines, described George Dantzig's simplex algorithm simply and precisely.

> That was the overwhelming, crucial experience.

This is the crucial feature of the APL family for me: they permit algorithm discussions via inline, not block, content.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970345

Edit 2: Upon reflection, it's probably also the Achilles' Heel of the APL family: most people vastly prefer easy and DWIMy over simple and precise.

Edit 3: found the paper containing the simplex algorithm: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DFSP.htm Note that 1960 was before "structured programming" so we now have (with the benefit of hindsight) much better ways to express the control flow of this calculation.

> most people vastly prefer easy and DWIM over simple and precise

Most people also vastly prefer not having to work on difficult problems. Iverson was clearly trying to provide a notation that would help the (admittedly smaller) group of people who find solving difficult problems interesting and valuable.

In the beginning of the computer age all problems were difficult. If not because of the problem itself then because of the limitations of the machines. It's amazing they did as much as they did with so little, your average Arduino makes the best hardware from those days look puny.

That is true, but OTOH I maintain that - in absolute terms - there are more difficult problems that people are struggling to solve using computers today than there were in 1970.

If you're the M Kromberg, any chance you could ask J Scholes to whip up a dfns version of Iverson's 1960 Simplex algo for us?

Sadly, John Scholes passed away in 2019. https://aplwiki.com/wiki/John_Scholes

Sorry to hear that, but very glad to have run across http://dfns.dyalog.com/downloads/howcomp.pdf as a result...

John was working on implementing negative right arguments to ⎕DL (the delay function in all APL implementations). As soon as that is sorted, we expect him to reappear.

John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.

John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com