Conway's Game Of Life in APL

What people said

Cactus2018 · 2020-08 · Strong recommendation

> Here's a video that really illustrates the power of this paradigm: [VIDEO] Amazing game of life code!

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kragen · 2019-10 · Strong recommendation

Try watching this video; it will only take you 8 minutes, but within 3 minutes you should have an idea of why array languages are different from having an ndarray library available in Rust or having typeclasses in Haskell: [VIDEO] After you watch that you will of course suspect that APL and other array languages like J are a sort of DSL for things like numerical linear algebra, which is of course what Numpy and Octave are. (Even though the Game of Life isn't linear algebra, it's very clearly matrix-based, so it doesn't seem that far off.) Dyalog has posted some other videos demonstrating the use of their proprietary APL for different things, but I think a more interesting one is [LINK] , by J inventor Roger Hui. This is an hour and a half, but it demonstrates some approaches to reducing different problems to multidimensional arrays, of pointers ("boxes") in some cases. This ought to be enough to convince you that there's an alien kind of thinking here, quite different from the Haskell and Rust approaches, that can be applied to a wide variety of problems. Now, I'm not Stevan Apter, so I'm not going to try to convince you that this alien kind of thinking is better . But it's clearly different , and different ways of thinking work best in different situations.

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sethrin · 2018-07 · Strong recommendation

The following video is probably reasonably well known, and I wish that I had a more intelligent commentary than to say that it blows my mind, but it does I think bear out the point of expressivity rather well. [VIDEO] Conway's Game of Life in some 50 characters of APL.

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