
APL\3000 – HP Journal – July 1977 [pdf] - i_don_t_know
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1977-07.pdf
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drallison
Those interested in the history of APL\3000 may find
[http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/write/memoirs/apl.html](http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/write/memoirs/apl.html)
interesting.

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i_don_t_know
The issue contains a lot of interesting information about the APL\3000 system,
in particular, tricks used in the implementation.

A complete list of issues of the hp journal is available at:

[http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/hpjindex.html](http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/hpjindex.html)

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pjmlp
Thanks for pointing it out.

It is a gold mine of systems programming languages articles, in a world where
C wasn't yet something that actually mattered.

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jxy
It's amazing how much a few KB of memory could achieve then. APL may perform
extremely well on phones and watches nowadays. I can't believe no one is doing
it.

I have J on my phone, and it works well as an advanced programmable
calculator.

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CommieBobDole
Looks like the author of this, Ken Van Bree is still around; he left Agilent
in 2003 to start a construction imaging software business. Just did a
presentation at the SPAR3D conference last month.

[https://www.spar3d.com/event/speaker/ken-
vanbree-2/](https://www.spar3d.com/event/speaker/ken-vanbree-2/)

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leephillips
Got to love Fig. 2. APL was the first language I learned, in 1976. When I was
in the position to have to use Fortran, I was horrified. I have to write loops
for everything?! But nowadays, I think array Fortran is quite nice.

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3rdAccount
Because you at least don't have to write classes for everything? :)

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glhaynes
Slashes and backslashes got pretty wild in the '70s and '80s.

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rbanffy
There were lots of jokes about OS/2 being just half an OS.

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mchahn
In the first paragraph" "..its ease of programming and debugging."

APL is one of the most unapproachable languages I every learned.

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agumonkey
that cover page is so damn glorious..

and fig 2 / page 5 is epic

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unixhero
mmm dat keyboard

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rbanffy
It was good, but the IBM beam spring ones were better. They still beat
anything else, before or since.

I've played with J, but APL, with the symbols, feels nicer.

Even though it's almost impossible to dictate code to someone when pair
programming.

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Fellshard
There's a few videos on YouTube of someone demoing APL in a modern context,
and dictating the meaning of the symbols aloud; it felt strangely cryptic, but
I'm sure someone who's worked with APL for some time would probably be able to
latch onto it okay.

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unixhero
Maybe it's this guy
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Chyrosran22/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Chyrosran22/videos)

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Fellshard
Ahh, to clarify: Not the keyboard, but the language itself, live-coding some
things.

