
Dyalog APL 16.0 - sndean
http://www.dyalog.com/dyalog/dyalog-versions/160.htm
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jxy
I like it that they are adding more and more functionalities from J, probably
because Roger Hui is involved in this. The namespace system in Dyalog APL
works far better than J's locale, IMHO.

The only problem is that you can't get the source code. Look around, in this
21st century, how many interpreters are still closed sourced? I really worry
about their long term survivability.

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throwaway7645
Closed source is less of a problem for me than the draconian licensing. Paying
such steep costs to use in production is a no go for me. I could afford the
$1500 personal productivity tool fee for just myself, but then none of my
coworkers can use anything I write which probably doesn't help advertising. I
really like the symbols more than J, but J ends up being more practical for
me. I think if array langs are to take off, kx systems would have to make
their software free and just charge for support, but I doubt they'll do that
with how much money they're making.

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protomyth
I still don't get the companies that cannot take the lessons of Smalltalk
vendors. It's no accident Borland could sell product and Smalltalk vendors
died off with developer and deployment fees.

I still think there is a place for paid tools, but more JetBrain / old Borland
then ParcPlace.

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throwaway7645
Yea. Ain't nobody wanna pay a deployment fee. Visual Studio charges for the
IDE as I understand it which you don't even have to use.

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eggy
I really like Dyalog. I paid for the personal license before they made it
free, but then when I thought about developing things for fun, and possibly
commercial reasons, the licensing put me off. I still play with Dyalog, but J
is the better fit for my needs right now. I am glad Roger Hui is on board, and
I hope it does the same thing J did, and open source the code. I have a
fondness for the characters in APL for no real objective reason. Maybe my love
of symbols to make things concise and in one eyeful.

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throwaway7645
Yea, I use a lot of symbols in my emails (obviously nothing like APL), but
enough for me to realize I like that kind of notation.

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pvitz
On a side note, the latest J 806 beta finally includes support for AVX. Let's
see how this will impact the performance.

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throwaway7645
I skimmed the Wikipedia article on AVX, but have no clue what it means. Care
to go into a little more detail? Targeting the additional instructions will
slow things down you think?

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brutos
AVX are vector instructions. They work on wide register (256bit) where you can
stuff 8 32bit floats (or in later versions ints) or 4 (double, or longs not
sure if AVX2 or later has support for that), or 16 chars (AVX2 iirc).

APL, as an array language, should, in theory at least, especially profit from
automatic vectorization by the compiler. If the auto-vectorization works well,
you get get a 4-16x speed-up for free (if you don't have data dependencies).

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throwaway7645
Well that sounds amazing!

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rebootthesystem
I love APL, used it professionally for about a decade.

I hate the APL ecosystem.

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nickpeterson
That seems to be about right. I really wish there was a decently maintained,
open source, apl derivative with the source on GitHub. The nearest I could
find was Kona but it looks like that has pretty minimal activity. It seems
like anyone with the ability to make this a reality just creates a new
variants , closes the source, and charges for the tooling (like Kerf).

