

APL Demonstration From 1975 [video] - colinprince
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA

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leephillips
That was awesome. APL was my first language, and I've used those IBM selectric
terminals, as well as Decwriter APL paper terminals. The "computer room" was a
noisy place. Game of life animations didn't work well.

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gtani
IBM APL2 was my first language, along with C. At one time Merrill Lynch and
Morgan Stanley had gigantic APL2 workspaces (ML) and Sharp (MS) that they used
for most of their mortgage trading and underwriting analytics, and a few dozen
APL programmers. They were noisy places cause people were always screaming
obscenities at each other

An acquaintance of mine had a job in high school, that entailed coding for Ken
Iverson in APL. That's how he learned

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julienchastang
I watched this video a while back (and I don't think this is the first time it
has been on HN). What is astonishing is Professor Bob Spence does not seem to
make any typos during the half hour long video. It is good to see renewed
interest in APL. I am still waiting for an APL interpreter on a tablet to take
advantage of virtual keyboards to deal with the APL glyphs.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/APL...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/APL-
keybd2.svg/1000px-APL-keybd2.svg.png)

~~~
DonGateley
And it simply must support overstrike since that is no longer a display
problem. The simplification of the keyboard that results is amazing. I've
always been surprised that overstrike did not re-emerge with "bit mapped
displays" and printers.

I started APL on a Selectric typewriter with the dancing type ball at IBM in
1967. The sounds of that demo still resonate more than I would have ever
expected.

In 1975 I was using it to teach myself numeric signal processing. I think I
learned it more deeply and quickly because of APL. One didn't so much code
functionality as simply express what one wanted to see the consequences of.
APL made exploration so easy you couldn't help it.

Had IBM had any idea what to do with APL, Matlab would simply not exist.

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Jun8
This was posted on the other APL thread earlier today, but in case you missed
it: Conway's game of life in one line of APL
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4).

