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Comment by mhuffman | Hacker News Reader

If you like podcasts you might check out the Array Cast podcast if you haven't.

>https://www.arraycast.com/

I'll third the ArrayCast, the host is Conor Hoekstra, a C++ programmer at NVidia Research. Regular panelists include Adám Brudzewsky[1] who works at Dyalog APL, Bob Therriault[2] who runs the J Wiki[3], Stephen Taylor who works with K and Q and cut his teeth on APL planning one of Chris Bonnington's Mt. Everest[4], Marshall Lochbaum who worked on J and APL and developed the BQN[5] language. All the episodes have transcripts on their site.

And their guests include Jeremy Howard the founder of fast.ai and Kaggle, Henry Rich implementer of the J language, Stevan Apter a K programmer and creator of No Stinking Loops site ( nsl.com ), Andrew Sengul who created April a blend of APL and Lisp, Morten Kromberg the CTO of Dyalog APL, Aaron Hsu creator of the co-dfns GPU compiler for APL, Brooke Allen a Wall Street entrepreneur and APL programmer, Eric Iverson son of Ken Iverson the APL creator and J designer/developer, Ashok Reddy former chemical engineer and employee at Rational (the UML people) now CEO of the KX company, Atilla Vrabecz a PhD Chemist turned K language entrepreneur, Leslie Goldsmith former APL developer at I.P. Sharp, John Earnest creator of the Ok language, Troels Henriksen creator of the GPU accelerated language Futhark, Lib Gibson former APL developer and consultant and project/developer manager at I.P. Sharp, programming polyglot Romilly Cocking, programming polyglot Vanessa McHale, and others.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=abrudz

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bobterryo

[3] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page

[4] https://github.com/5jt/swf75

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24167804

It's a great podcast! I'm the 1st of the guests you listed, in fact. :D If folks are interested in learning APL and array programming, you might like the ~20 hour video series we created:

https://forums.fast.ai/t/apl-array-programming/97188

You might also like our complete Dyalog APL reference, which (AFAIK) is unique in never using symbols in examples which haven't been covered earlier in the reference. So you can read it top to bottom to learn the whole set.

https://fastai.github.io/apl-study/apl.html

Wanna second the Array Cast. Really, really solid stuff even if you're not specifically interested in the array languages.

Yes, I didn't mention that but they have a rotating schedule of some of the most elite programmers you have ever heard. I will also say that array programming is very seductive if you have the "puzzle solving" mentality that a lot of us have. It seems so elegant. I have never found a legitimate use for it in my paying work, but I am captivated by it privately.

What bars do you use to measure “legitimate use”?

I don't mean that the languages are not legitimate, mostly what would be acceptable to either management or a client. Also, I feel that setting someone up with code that they might have to maintain if I leave should be easy for them to handle and J, APL, or K would require them finding a rare developer.

Both are reasonable concerns. If you were running your own company the calculus might change though. Or not but I’d say it certainly could. Similarly for code which is not client facing.

Yeah, there's really great history and some amazing stories to be heard from the interviews.

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