The Origins of APL - 1974

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znowi · 2013-07 · Recommendation

There's a great link in the original comments to a video from 1974, where Iverson, Falkoff, and others discuss the origins of APL. It was a pleasure to watch. A peculiar contrast in language and attitude to today's rockstars and ninjas :) [VIDEO]

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sunkencity · 2012-06 · Recommendation

I recently bought "APL an interactive approach" and read it. It seems that most of the good stuff from APL is already present in modern languages, and better when it's lazy. The OO stuff in APL looks kind of crufty. Still it's a wonderful fascinating language. In the age of mature open-source it feels very old fashioned with the expensiveness of a decent implementation. Btw, this is a fantastic tv segment from days of yore "The Origins of APL - 1974": [VIDEO]

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thesz · 2026-01 · Reference

Skilled devs compress, not generate (expand). [VIDEO] The "discoverer" of APL tried to express as many problems as he could with his notation. First he found that notation expands and after some more expansion he found that it began shrinking. The same goes to Forth, which provides means for a Sequitur-compressed [1] representation of a program. [1] [LINK] Myself, I always strive to delete some code or replace some code with shorter version. First, to better understand it, second, to return back and read less.

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