Interview with Dr. Ken Iverson (1982) | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Dr. Ken Iverson (1982)

arraycast.com

81 pointstosh21 comments

> The future, we are told, will belong to those familiar with the computer. What a joke this would be if only it didn't victimize so many innocent bystanders.

prescient. this is one if the best articles i have read in years. the 1970s were a liminal place, between great eras. montreal thrived. there are few people this smart today who talk about the future with such accuracy because its hard to describe it using essential first principles- like how languages are just made of strings, which are lists, which are vectors, which are tables, which are matrices. its the simplest thing in the world if you think about it...

Nice interview. While using APL professionally for around ten years, I had the opportunity to attend lectures with Iverson and a number of the top APL guys from the era (the guys who wrote all the APL books of the time). Talk about a guy and an idea that was way ahead of its time. I still have a picture I took with him during on of the annual APL conferences in the 80's.

The episode of Array Cast released prior to this one is also worth a listen: I.P. Sharp and Associates - A Company Ahead of its Time[1].

It is also pieced together with “found” audio of Iverson and others, and it’s narrated by Bob Therriault. Subjectively, it quickly became one of my favorite audio pieces of all time!

The I.P. Sharp company sounded like a truly incredible place to work.

1: https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode91-ipsharpdoc

Wow. I did enjoy putting it together, but I did not expect 'on of my favourite of all time'. Thank you.

As a critique my own work, I think it feels like a bit of a sales piece on the company and the culture, although that it is an accurate account of what the participants were saying. I also wanted to show that the aggressive commodified start up culture that seems to have been adopted is not the only way to succeed in tech. I think that was the most important message that I was trying to get across.

I thought it came across as genuine and reflected the sentiments of past interviews with I.P. Sharpers without the tint of rose colored glasses (as these interviews were made at the time).

As someone who has spent quite a bit of time in the lousy job market the last two years, the thing that stood out to me most was the philosophy of having an open door and allowing people in to see if they are a good fit (and ultimately allowing them make that decision for themselves). While I’m not sure if the interview-by-light-meter holds up, I can’t say that I feel that tech interviewing, as practiced today, holds up either.

Thank you so much for your work on this, Bob! I’m sure you spent a lot of time on it, and it really shows. Wonderful job.

P.S. Did you happen to come across the article with Professor Weizenbaum that Iverson quotes in the interview with Whitney Smith? I’d love to read it.

In spite of having the surname Therriault, I have only high school French, but this article would have been about the right time and publication for the Weizenbaum quote. http://referentiel.nouvelobs.com/archives_pdf/OBS0995_198312...

I am not sure where the English translation would be, but being Canadian it would not surprise me if Dr. Iverson was able to translate it himself.

The English translation that Iverson mentions was in Harper's magazine. Iverson says it “was a report of an interview with Professor Weizenbaum,” so I’m not sure how complete it is.

In spite of having developed Harper’s first Android application, I no longer have a subscription to the back catalog, but perhaps I can put my library card to use!

Thanks for the link to the French article.

Thanks for this, very enjoyable.

When i worked with a few dozen APL2 devs, there was a devoted clique who would always remind us of ways in which Sharp APL was superior to IBM's tho i can't remember details. I only remember STSC and APL2 dialects weren't all that different. And now, when i do C#, linq and kotlin, it seems like a romanization (and update) of APL.

It's interesting how "array programming" (I think) was a sort of prediction of what we would be doing with GPUs today. (At least that's what occurred to me just now.)

Does anyone with this expertise have a sense for how APL relates to modern GPU programming? Is there an influence? Or is it a completely different model?

Array programming seems adaptable to any form of parallel processing: SIMD instructions, multi-core, or GPUs. I think it's because, in addition to their inherent parallelism, primitives are so simple that they make very few demands on an implementation. GPU code can be a lot more flexible than array programming because the processors have a bit of independence, so array primitives are not necessarily the best way to use a GPU, but they're pretty good and the limitations might make it easier for a human to think about.

"And if you say that, can we make machines that would somehow simulate that behavior so that a person could not really tell the difference whether it's a living organism or a machine, I'm sure that's already possible to a large extent."

Also (mind the year this is from!):

— Can you teach a computer to write poetry?

— If you can teach it--yes, there's nothing easier. One of the things is that you could do, for example, you could simply give it a collection of poems or prose or whatever you have, and then provide a program which selects pieces from these, either individual words, individual phrases, individual passages, and so on, and merges them together according to some criterion, which you would then write into the program, and also with a certain element of chance. Usually, you know, you'd say, "Well, you want to pick this sometimes, that sometimes." Yes, you can write it, but you raise the question, what would be the point?

What would be the point, indeed...

Stonks

Early computer folks were visionaries, they did plenty of stuff and ideas, that we are still slowly catching up to.

Imagine being able to do this on a random tablet (from ),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ

The best we got is something like this,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifYuvgXZ108

Lovely one this, highly recommended.

Special thanks to Bob Bernecky and Whitney Smith for preserving this archival material and making it available to our podcast.

transcript: https://www.arraycast.com/episode92-transcript

Although we do make the content available through text, as the editor of the episode I think there is a great benefit to hearing Dr. Iverson speak. The nuances of his humour and the warmth of his personality can not really be captured in text.

Some people have diminished auditory capabilities.

Yes, we create written transcripts for those folks with diminished auditory capabilities because we think that it is important to be as accessible as possible. In fact many who do not have auditory challenges choose to read instead of listen. That is their choice.

My previous comment was directed to those who are in a position to have a choice in their media consumption and might not realize what they could be missing by reading the transcript.

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