Yea. His discussions on HN (user arcfide) are well worth reading.
Some users thought his compiler was a farce before he posted the stats. Yea it's just a few pages, but the magic is getting to just a few pages. It apparently took 4M loc of added and then deleted code to get there (iirc it was a huge number).
It integrates an APL-like language (q) with a very nice time-series database (kdb+). Q programmers are highly prized on Wall St and can pull in truly staggering salaries.
I remember being snowed in and having nothing to read but back issues of QuoteQuad -- it was glorious :)
Also APL for the TRS-80 Model I, despite not being able to show the APL charset (without a Graphtrax programmable character generator) was quite cool in exposing people to a language a bit off the beaten BASIC path that most were exposed to.
I've been looking for a while for a copy of the original red Plivka/Pakin APL book (not the APL2 one, even tho APL2 is what i know best), and they're there now on amazon, under $10.
Now i can relive the arguments about whether Sharp, STSC or APL2 was best
I love how it's published by Wiley and Sons. It reminds me of that episode of Different Strokes where someone asks the old rich patriarch how he got his wealth, and he says [paraphrased], "You know all that oil they got in the Middle East? Well someone has to sell them the barrels!"
I'm confused, is the word "A" the name of the language which is a predecessor to C, or was it just intended as the article "a"? As in, "Here's a programming language."
A Programming Language is the book title. The language it describes came to be known as "APL" [0], but the author didn't explicitly name it that way in the book.
Dyalog APL in general supports a lot of old and new technology from interacting with R & Python to Jupyter Notebooks, ODBC, .NET, COM, DDE, Parallel multicore functions, graphics, multiplatform IDE, GPU support via Aaron Hsu's compiler, functional programming via DFNS & Tacit Function Trains...etc
