APL Demonstration From 1975 [video] | Hacker News Reader

APL Demonstration From 1975 [video]

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71 pointscolinprince7 comments

That was awesome. APL was my first language, and I've used those IBM selectric terminals, as well as Decwriter APL paper terminals. The "computer room" was a noisy place. Game of life animations didn't work well.

IBM APL2 was my first language, along with C. At one time Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley had gigantic APL2 workspaces (ML) and Sharp (MS) that they used for most of their mortgage trading and underwriting analytics, and a few dozen APL programmers. They were noisy places cause people were always screaming obscenities at each other

An acquaintance of mine had a job in high school, that entailed coding for Ken Iverson in APL. That's how he learned

I watched this video a while back (and I don't think this is the first time it has been on HN). What is astonishing is Professor Bob Spence does not seem to make any typos during the half hour long video. It is good to see renewed interest in APL. I am still waiting for an APL interpreter on a tablet to take advantage of virtual keyboards to deal with the APL glyphs. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/APL...

Ngn-APL works relatively well on mobile (Javascript based.) I'd also love something more native, though

Good point about the mistakes. Interfaces in the old days didn't have any forgiveness, so one didn't make any mistakes. Like playing the piano.

And it simply must support overstrike since that is no longer a display problem. The simplification of the keyboard that results is amazing. I've always been surprised that overstrike did not re-emerge with "bit mapped displays" and printers.

I started APL on a Selectric typewriter with the dancing type ball at IBM in 1967. The sounds of that demo still resonate more than I would have ever expected.

In 1975 I was using it to teach myself numeric signal processing. I think I learned it more deeply and quickly because of APL. One didn't so much code functionality as simply express what one wanted to see the consequences of. APL made exploration so easy you couldn't help it.

Had IBM had any idea what to do with APL, Matlab would simply not exist.

This was posted on the other APL thread earlier today, but in case you missed it: Conway's game of life in one line of APL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4.

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