Comment by ritonlajoie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritonlajoie | Hacker News Reader

I have an issue with APL. My grandfather who is a researcher in forest science (sorry English is not my main language), made his own software in APL to manage his own forest. Now, he is becoming old, and trying to get me to get the software, and to understand it for when he will pass.

The thing is, I'm a C++ dev professionally, but whenever I see his code in APL, I cringe. I can't get to make him understand that building what is basically a dynamic spreadsheet in APL is kind of complicated for me, coming from an OO side of programming. Also, that's the only language he knows.

I have a hard time telling him that all the work he did and still does in APL (I guess now there are like thousands of lines) will just go to trash and my uncles will just use Excel to do that when they'll take over the forest business.

Edit: I have another issue with DyalogAPL. When my grandfather sends me a workspace , I can't open it because DyalogAPL is not that much backward compatible ! So if we don't have the exact same version, I just can't open his workspace. It's 2014 , damn !

+1 for sharing it github (although git sucks ;) have you actually read the glimpse of heaven article? the tone of your comment made me suspicious... :/

i have basic, z80/x86/pic asm, forth, pascal, c, rebol, bash, awk, ruby, js experience. i've seen the game of life live coding demo a few years ago and also played with j while it was still closed source. to put it into perspective, im only 38yrs old.

after reading this glimpse of heaven apl article, its vibe hit me so im circling back to apl for the 3rd day already. i find it fun and elegant. the the keyboard layout is not an issue either; ⍳⍴×←=⍺⍵⌈⌊ were all very natural after a few minutes.

i would say, u would benefit greatly from learning apl. it's definitely not the past.

just have a look at the nile language for example: https://raw.github.com/wiki/damelang/nile/socal.pdf

bret victor wrote a nice interactive visualizer for it in js: http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/high_contrast.html

cool shit is coming up and you will be left out if the only thing is c++ which you are comfortable with...

also it sounds quite heart breaking how you discount your grandfather's work... kinda disrespectful... and you are even wasting his time left on earth by recommending him to learn python? just spend a few hours with apl and it should be clear to you too why did he say python sucks. maybe try to implement a bit of his code in python or on a spreadsheet. that should be quite informative (and probably transformative) too.

Man, I hope when I have grandchildren, they won't want to throw a bundle of my life's work in the trash.

Maybe github instead?

Well, I don't want to... but I have no time nor real interest in trying to understand what he did in APL. My only issue is that he is not interested in hearing from me that nobody will take over what he did.. He won't listen ;( He thinks everything else sucks.. I tried to make him read some stuff about python for example. He said this sucked also ! lol

Consider the possibility that what your grandfather tells you might actually be true.

Just because some tech is old doesn't make it bad. People solving and writing programs in 60s and 70s were just as smart as we are, work to extract their wisdom.

And worked with limitations sufficiently strong that they had to extract every ounce of functionality out of the hardware they had at their disposal.

Before trashing a complicated program in a serious programming language and replacing it with Excel, consider this:

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a...

It can actually be fun learning radically different programming languages. I find it improves my programming in my primary language. And you're in the lucky position of having someone who can help you learn.

Yeah, doesn't always have to be you teaching others that your way of programming is the "right" way.

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