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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

This happens with proprietary languages. How many people can afford $100k/CPU, however good it is? How many can play around with a language like that at home? Who's going to write infrastructure around such a thing?

Hadoop is pretty crap - I know, I used to use it professionally. You know what else is crap? Unix. People are going on about cgroups as an exciting new feature, when better implementations were around what, thirty years ago in Real OSes.

It doesn't matter. Commodity wins, and sooner or later if there are good ideas to be had we'll find them again.

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How APL is proprietary? Anybody can implement it, and there are opensource implementations available. The 100k/CPU price the author referred to was about the high performance database integrated with a vector processing language engine.

It is not about commodity. cgroups-like functionality was available in many opensource OSes for years (e.g. FreeBSD jails), but was easily dismissed by majority as worthless. This is exactly what the author was talking about referring to Lady Gaga -- the modern programming community is driven by fashion regardless of how good or bad the current fashionable technology is. I do not find it surprising however, as it is a direct result of the order of magnitude growth of the programmer's population, which is behaviorally much more close to the general population currently that it used to be.

Actually the Lady Gaga analogy is a little bit deeper. Lady Gaga is very good musician, but she intentionally pursues money/fame/attention/whatever instead of originality/art/excellence.

>Lady Gaga is very good musician

Compared to what? Beethoven? Charles Mingus? That she can produce some shitty pop tune to be forgotten in a few months after release doesn't indicate much.

She is classically trained and went to a good school. That sets her apart from the overwhelming majority of contemporary pop acts, whose training is mostly from karaoke pub competitions. She's no Beethoven, but she might have been; that's the point.

> contemporary pop acts, whose training is mostly from karaoke pub competitions.

Source?

So true ... I don't really appreciate her current music (I mean like Brahms or Mozart), but she was so bluesy in the NYU talent show (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM). I could listen to music like that all day.

What open source implementations are those? I spent some time recently learning APL, and the only one I could find was NARS2000 which is Windows-only, very buggy and has practically no documentation available.

If you know of any others, please let me know. I certainly haven't found anything.

There's A+, from Morgan Stanley. It is actually a variant of APL, but it looks mostly like it (unlike J, it retains APL's hieroglyph characters, etc.) Licensed under GPL.

The A+ website is http://www.aplusdev.org/ for those interested.

FWIIW, I couldn't get this to build.

It is also in the Fedora repositories (yum install aplus-fsf). I would imagine that it would be in Debian/Ubuntu too, but I don't have a current install to check. If all else fails, you can probably grab the source RPM to see how Fedora/Redhat got it to build.

There's OpenAPL, but I've no experience with it (yet).

https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona is an open source implementation of K3.2

(Though note that the most recent version of K, K4, is a much cleaner and simpler language - I'm not aware of an open source version of that)

s/Unix/Linux/

When you say "Unix" did you mean to say "Linux"?

"Real OSes"

Can you name an example or two? I'm aware of some old non-UNIX OSes that are still around but which over time have become largely ignored. I'm curious the "Real OSes" you were thinking of.

"How many can play around with a language like that at home?"

As many as have the desire and time to do so. Learners are limited to 32bit and no long running jobs in excess of 1 hour, but this does not stop anyone from learning the language. There's also an open source alternative of the intepreter based on an earlier version of the language.

So what isn't crap?

Stuff made in industries more mature than software. Bridges were probably all crap for the first fifty years of building them too.

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