Hard to say. What does a person who devoted decades at IBM and around the world promoting and speaking about the idea of a symbolic language as a tool for thought think about abandoning that idea entirely? I actually heard him give this presentation in person way back when at an international ACM APL conference (I attended to a few of them).
> What does "effortless expression of ideas at an entirely different level of thought" mean in concrete terms? What level? What ideas? I'm enticed, but unseeing.
I understand. It's hard to communicate something like this. I sometimes equate it to a bird trying to explain to a human being what it feels like to fly. One can get to an approximation, but at some point the only way to see it is to become a bird.
The best explanation I have found requires the reader to have formal musical training. Far more people have this than the opportunity to use APL on a daily basis for a couple of years. Rather than repeat it here, I just offered the explanation to Volt. Here it is:
> Dyalog APL can make executable files. The main catch is that you need a license to run them, as well as a license to develop them.
Right. Because APL ended-up being used in the financial industry we have a situation where you have various versions of it offered as paid licenses rather than FOSS. This, right there, pretty much killed the language. There are interesting experiments out there, NARS2000 perhaps being the most accessible. However, this isn't going to bring the language to forefront in any imaginable way.
Put simply:
If you can't develop useful software solutions with APL better and faster than with other languages, well, it is useless.
For example, I can't build a website with APL. I can't build and deploy ML applications. I can't program an embedded system. I can't build a CAD program or a game. Etc.
What is it good for then?
Today? Not much. As much as I love what the language represents it is my opinion that the only reason it still exists is because there might be codebases in corners of financial institutions that rely on it. With time this too will evaporate. At that stage APL becomes a language of academic interest, and that's about it.
> Even APL implementations don't agree on the exact behaviour of the core APL functions.
Well, yeah, that's today. I'll call it "30 years after the start of the end". Back in the 80's, for the most part, you had the IBM APL/APL2 flavor and, at a popular level, STSC's PC implementation. There were others, but, for the most part, the APL core followed Iverson's original APL. IBM added such things as nested arrays and a few other nice improvements. In many ways IBM dropped the ball. I can't blame STSC, they did not have the staying power IBM has. IBM could have evolved, open sourced and popularized APL. They did not.
To add a little bit to the idea of notation and how, as one example, it enables the recognition of patterns, here's one of the most famous APL libraries.
They are called "idioms" precisely because these expressions can be like words once you internalize them (something that happens naturally to a professional user of the language). It's interesting to explore the library and maybe try a few of the idioms on something like NARS2000.
Hard to say. What does a person who devoted decades at IBM and around the world promoting and speaking about the idea of a symbolic language as a tool for thought think about abandoning that idea entirely? I actually heard him give this presentation in person way back when at an international ACM APL conference (I attended to a few of them).
> What does "effortless expression of ideas at an entirely different level of thought" mean in concrete terms? What level? What ideas? I'm enticed, but unseeing.
I understand. It's hard to communicate something like this. I sometimes equate it to a bird trying to explain to a human being what it feels like to fly. One can get to an approximation, but at some point the only way to see it is to become a bird.
The best explanation I have found requires the reader to have formal musical training. Far more people have this than the opportunity to use APL on a daily basis for a couple of years. Rather than repeat it here, I just offered the explanation to Volt. Here it is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20770420
> Dyalog APL can make executable files. The main catch is that you need a license to run them, as well as a license to develop them.
Right. Because APL ended-up being used in the financial industry we have a situation where you have various versions of it offered as paid licenses rather than FOSS. This, right there, pretty much killed the language. There are interesting experiments out there, NARS2000 perhaps being the most accessible. However, this isn't going to bring the language to forefront in any imaginable way.
Put simply:
If you can't develop useful software solutions with APL better and faster than with other languages, well, it is useless.
For example, I can't build a website with APL. I can't build and deploy ML applications. I can't program an embedded system. I can't build a CAD program or a game. Etc.
What is it good for then?
Today? Not much. As much as I love what the language represents it is my opinion that the only reason it still exists is because there might be codebases in corners of financial institutions that rely on it. With time this too will evaporate. At that stage APL becomes a language of academic interest, and that's about it.
> Even APL implementations don't agree on the exact behaviour of the core APL functions.
Well, yeah, that's today. I'll call it "30 years after the start of the end". Back in the 80's, for the most part, you had the IBM APL/APL2 flavor and, at a popular level, STSC's PC implementation. There were others, but, for the most part, the APL core followed Iverson's original APL. IBM added such things as nested arrays and a few other nice improvements. In many ways IBM dropped the ball. I can't blame STSC, they did not have the staying power IBM has. IBM could have evolved, open sourced and popularized APL. They did not.