Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

APL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation, and move on rather than digging in. I highly recommend Dyalog's dialect for a comfortable IDE, OO support, .NET support for GUIs on Windows etc.

For MS' APL dialect, you can get the whole thing from: http://www.aplusdev.org/

My understanding is that they still have many many lines of code written in this language running. They also use a commercial intellectual successor of this language called q from kx systems. Many other firms do as well, but I won't name them since I don't know which ones are public about it.

I'm pretty sure that the firms I know creating new languages are not public about it, but there are at least 3 very very large ones doing so. Aiming for a functional flavor, large-scale parallelism, streaming, low-latency processing of large data sets, high-quality compilation and leveraging new hardware are common themes.



For what its worth, a+ was mostly used in the fixed income decision. Over in equities, I never touched it - most of my work was in perl and SAS.


True - joel kaplan's group in FID was the source iirc.


didn't stop every fucking aurora machine from bitching about missing kaplgallant though. heh.


Well just in case you wanna cry into your beer over that font - you can get it here for old times sake.

http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz


nooooooooooooooooooooo


Yep, I used to work with a bloke from IP Sharp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates#APL_Impl...), he showed me some cool stuff. I have another friend who does q and kdb+ stuff.


I currently work with a bunch of Sharpies, including Dave Markwick (mentioned in that article). Dave still writes APL from time to time.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: