

Fear and Loathing with APL - theburningmonk
http://theburningmonk.com/2015/06/fear-and-loathing-with-apl/?ref=hn

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delish
"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen
where one spends more time thinking than typing."

\- Philip Greenspun

From
[http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html)

I adore languages with a high thinking-to-googling ratio. I've been typing the
code in this example. Even though I use my mouse to type APL characters, it
feels _fast_. Really, really enjoyable.

Thanks to the author; this is readable and fun.

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brudgers
One of Iverson's changes when he created J as a successor to APL is that all
the operators are ASCII characters.

[http://jsoftware.com/](http://jsoftware.com/)

Open source and even available on Android so it can be run on a phone.

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aidenn0
A few years back, I ran into two professional APL developers. Apparently there
are still 3 major commercial APL vendors (not counting IBM, which probably
still sells APL2). Each targeting their own niche, and each being expensive if
you're used to free compilers (starting on the order of $1k per seat).

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coliveira
A language that shares the same philosophy but is a little more approachable
is J (jsoftware). Unlike APL, it only uses normal ascci punctuation marks. J
is also open source, which is a big advantage over APL.

~~~
Avshalom
There's GNUapl which is coming along nicely.

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RBerenguel
Yup, GnuAPL is getting better every time I use it for anything. Dyalog for
personal use is also very good and decently affordable (and they just released
a Mac version, I got to test the beta as an interested user and it works very
nicely)

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zaphar
APL is an awesome language with _one_ glaring flaw. It's impossible to read
and you need a special input method to type. I enjoy reading about it but I
can't imagine I'd ever enjoy having to work with it.

~~~
murbard2
That's two glaring flaws. You may want to try J, which only has one glaring
flaw.

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vezzy-fnord
YMMV, but I find the readability of J and K to be far worse precisely because
of the ASCII charset instead of the glyphs. The APL glyphs give me a concrete
context switching mechanism that I'm operating within its "alphabet" and the
semantics thereof. Whereas because I associate ASCII characters with plenty of
other meanings already, I find J and K to look like complete line noise in
comparison.

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joe_the_user
It seems like translating J or K to a glyph format for reading would be a
relatively simple matter.

~~~
murbard2
Would have to be a one to many relationship. Part of the problem with K is
that the meaning of an operator depends on the type of the operands. "?" can
be "generate a random number" or "search for an element in a list" for
instance. And yes, that is insane.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well, a parsing display system still sounds like a reasonably simple piece of
software.

Still, while I met J author Roger Hui years ago in college, I've never run a
line of J so I probably would be the one to create such a system.

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s_kilk
I really hope "Fear and Loathing in/with $TOOL" doesn't become the new "How I
learned to stop worrying and love $TOOL"

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oldmanjay
Fear and Loathing Considered Harmful?

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therealidiot
I don't know why "x considered harmful" articles irk me so much, but they do

~~~
Ardren
“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

[http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

