[codecraft] Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages | Locklin on science

[Zakariyya Mughal]

On 2015-08-04 at 22:47:46 -0400, Philip Durbin wrote:
> https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/ruins-of-forgotten-empires-apl-languages/

I currently have a book called "J for C Programmers" open in a tab
<http://www.jsoftware.com/help/jforc/_.htm>. It is a mind-bending
language if you do any numerical computing work.

Coming from MATLAB, R, NumPy, PDL, et al, I feel like there is much that
these more modern tools can learn from the APL lineage. It's a parallel
universe where shorter code is actually faster and more general at the
same time because it uses the right abstractions.

This post gives an idea of how it feels to code in SciPy
<http://www.vetta.org/2008/05/scipy-the-embarrassing-way-to-code/>. The
APL family takes that terseness to a whole new level. I'm not sure if
that's good or bad, but it certainly is interesting.

Cheers,
- Zaki Mughal