
Conway's Game of Life in one line of APL - nickb
http://catpad.net/michael/apl/?
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jksmith
Try a descendant in q/kdb+ at kx.com. No special symbol set required. For
reference, "Q for Mortals" is a good read, and Joel at wagerlabs.com blogs
about q/kdb+ occasionally.

q/kdb+ could turn into something really useful, and has some nice tricks, like
very easy to use remoting capabilities, and a way to send lambdas to another
machine anywhere and have that machine run the code. Unfortunately q/kdb+ are
still a bit too domain specific to the finance world where the product
apparently has a strong commercial following, so some of the stuff, like a
robust, secure web server to compliment the powerful remoting capabilities is
currently not available. Additionally, the language should have separate
variable creation and setter operators, because it would be pretty easy to
inadvertently start working with a new var after a mistype when an original
var was intended.

If this stuff was cleaned up for consumption by a larger market, I think it
would be pretty hot.

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michael_dorfman
That's a very clever hack.

I have to say, I'm glad to see APL getting some mainstream attention-- it
seems to be almost a forgotten language these days...

~~~
nickb
Having to use a special character set and a special keyboard didn't help its
adoption...

When I first saw APL, I thought it was Cree or hieroglyphics.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Unquestionably so (although it is interesting to note that there was a post
here a few weeks ago suggesting that the restriction of the ASCII character
set was holding language development back.)

What I find more interesting is how little reference there seems to be to it,
these days-- I'm not surprised that it is not in widespread usage, but I'd
think that it would come up more often in language-related discussions.

