Re: [9fans] Google finally announces their lightweight OS

[Robert Raschke <rtrlists@googlemail.com>]

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On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 1:14 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:

> > there has also been a lot of discussion in the past 1-2 months about
> > K, a successor to APL, in #plan9. you might ask there; i may have
> > missed a more recent development.
>
> could someone please explain to the ignorant, what
> is interesting about apl?  the last surge of interest i
> recall in the language was in 1983.  ibm offered an
> rom for the mga (monochrome graphics adapter)
> that substituted the odd apl characters for the
> equally-odd pc character set's bucky-bit characters.
>
> - erik
>
>
Don't view it as a programming language, view it as an executable
mathematical notation instead. And as such notations go, it is very
rigorous; but also a bit esoteric when you come at it from a programming
background.

The J "dialect" of APL (http://www.jsoftware.com, essentially the
continuation of Ken Iverson's development efforts after APL) is a great tool
for thinking about generalised operations on vectors, matrices, cubes, etc.
There's a great self-published book on graphics and image processing called
"Fractals Visualization and J" by Cliff Reiter.

The learning curve is very steep (unless you've never programmed and are
used to lots of math). And there is a tendency of adherents to strive for
the shortest possible expression(s) to solve a problem. That means it all
looks a bit opaque from the outside. But it is possible to write J code that
is elegant and easy to understand, even if you come back to it after some
time.

Robby

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