Actually, there was one person, Al Rose, who used to travel around with an IBM Selectric typewriter with an APL type ball, an acoustic coupler, and a small video camera and TV screen, demonstrating APL. He was a co-author of the famous book "APL, an Interactive Approach" <http://amzn.to/1vM5BJX> He put on a great show with APL, using the Selectric, showing off all the APL primitives. I will never forget how he described the interpreter's output: "it outputs the result right on the paper, like a house-trained puppy!" I think he got quite a few people started in APL. At least, I was one!
Skip Skip Cave Cave Consulting LLC On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Scott Locklin <[email protected]> wrote: > The learning curve is pretty steep, and with all respect due this group, > there is not yet a Paul Graham who has both the chops to get rich using the > tool, and the literary skill to enthrall people on the subject. > > Personally I am a novelty seeker. I liked Lisp, but was unhappy with it as > a numerics language (though it is quite capable of doing a good job here). > Never would have tried it if it were not for the eloquent Paul Graham > essays. I suspect a lot of people are like that. I daresay there would be > no Clojure or F# without Paul Graham. With J, I got lucky. I was trying to > build a mousetrap in Lisp, and someone smarter than me pointed out that it > would be a lot easier in J, and a lot of other things became super easy as > well. > > The main downside to such languages is ... using popular languages after > fooling around in a lisp or in J feels like going from a Porsche to Fred > Flintstone's car with cement wheels. Upside is, you can often find APL or > Lisp in a decent programming environment. Like learning latin. > > On a related topic, Kevin Lawler (author of Kona among other things) > pointed this course out to me the other day; a course on approximate > solutions to computationally hard problems taught in K. Man, I wish I had > taken such a course, taught in K or J. It looks mind melting. > > http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/CSCI-GA.2965-001/ > > > -SL > > > I'm not being rhetorical here but how would I have learned of array > > languages if I hadn't had mental machinery (makeup?) to set aside my > > biases/prejudices and give a new idea a decent chance (apparently this is > > hard in itself!!! who knew??)?? > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
