Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfosco | Hacker News Reader

My favorite example of APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

It's official. I am a total gumby. There are minds out there that are to mine as the entire city of New York is to a house brick and half a bagel. And they're all using APL.

I'm quite amazed how the author has not made any mistake in the presentation. I wonder if using APL leads to a different state of mind where tool is out of your way or was it simply a well rehearsed demo?

My prof also writes complex APL code live and I've never seen a program he made that didn't run or had a bug. He has a I ❤ APL sticker on his laptop. And he is a god damn genius, we can't compare us to him in absolutely no, no way. It doesn't lead to a different state of mind, that guy was already born a genius a little like rainman, but without the downsides.

He switched to J after I showed him that a few years ago and is ever happy since. He told me that he paid about 2000bucks for his APL compiler back then.

It does. I programmed in an APL 'derivative' (Q) for a while, it's quite easy to get the hang of it. The problem is that it's write only.

https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

Kona is free and would give people a flavour of this style of programming (minus the database tools).

http://www.jsoftware.com/

J is mentioned by another poster below (EDIT)

Grandparent post: if you are half a bagel and a housebrick, this stuff makes me feel like a few grains of sand and a peanut.

I suspect it was mostly the later. ;)

Nonetheless, because array programming requires unorthodox input and is sufficiently different than popular paradigms, authors typically write slower which may explain the deliberateness.

Love it, too. I used the vector-recurse-eval trick for drawing a Mandelbrot set in APL (Gnu APL, specifically)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com