
Conversation with Arthur Whitney, programming language designer - prakash
http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203/?pm=2&zin=170&u1=texterity&pg=12&z=107
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russell
It's a must read because it's so far outside our normal experience. First the
languages are derivatives of APL that do one thing very well and nothing else.
Don't try doing a web page in APL. Second, the programs efficiently process
billion and trillion line databases in a tightly constrained environment.
Third, Whitley throws away everything every few years and reimplements from
scratch, even the parts that work. He talked about millions of hours of
running time without an error. Pretty amazing.

It got me to thinking about the virtues of simplicity instead of the
increasing complexity that we are getting into.

~~~
gruseom
_[Whitney's] languages are derivatives of APL that do one thing very well and
nothing else._

I don't think that's fair. They are general-purpose languages. It's true that
they've mostly been used on certain classes of problems so far, but that could
just be a historical accident. Who's to say what people would make with them
if they found a broader audience?

Whitney is not someone who thinks in special cases.

Edit: I agree with everything else you said, though.

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frig
Thanks for posting this.

There's a reasonable argument that APL and derivatives are more expressive
than lisp and its derivatives, at the expensive of having a much larger
startup cost in terms of things you have to know.

I suspect that in another few years the old-school APL alphabet will be
positioned to start making a comeback, via in-software, touch-screen
'keyboards' (thereby eliminating the expense of a very small run of 'funny
symbol' keyboards).

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dhs
It's a bit hard to read in the web format, so you might want to download it as
a PDF:
[http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203/templates/download_offlin...](http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203/templates/download_offline)

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greggraham
I really enjoyed reading that. As russell said, it is far outside my
experience, but it is more like I wished my experience would have been.

I read an article on APL back in the early 80s and it sounded wonderful, but I
never had an occasion to learn or use it. The closest thing for me now are
list operations in Python and the collection functions I'm learning in Clojure
right now.

~~~
wagerlabs
Consider that Arthur's software sells for 25K per core and 8 cores is pretty
much a minimum. And that the sole executable is < 300K. Now re-read the
article :D.

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gruseom
What an absolute treat. Whitney has done things which, if he hadn't done them,
would be called impossible. It's such a shame that his work isn't widely
available. There's a whole world inside those 300 kb. It's the only thing I've
seen that got me as excited as Lisp.

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Hexstream
Tip: Click on the image to zoom in. This crucial functionality is so well-
hidden you could call it an easter egg. Horrible usability.

