No reason to doubt that IBM still promotes FUD ... even some of the APL people in IBM were not above doing it (ah the stories...)
Your reference to Siagusa is interesting to me. He is a good friend and a very modest man. His story is that he was introduced to APL at the Philadelphia Scientific Center in 1971 or 2, just after I had relocated there having already been thoroughly infected by APL... I cannot claim to have ever been a VM user - but that's another story. Anyway, Siagusa's reason for coming to the Scientific Center was that he was the assigned chaperone (really!) for the first female employee of IBM Japan to make an international business trip. His qualifications were that he and his wife lived in New York for several months while they were a part of the IBM exhibit at the 1964 World Fair there. Siagusa's university education was in Chinese history and he was not a technical person at all in 1971. Of course, the dedicated evangelists who made up the Philadelphia Scientific Center always descended on visitors with a conversion zeal. Siagusa was no exception. The visit changed his career direction (I don't know what became of the woman he was chaperoning...) One of the more amazing of his later accomplishments involved the 3279 color graphics terminal. It was developed (and manufactured) in Japan. It was ready to ship to customers, and there was NO software available to make it do any graphics... Siagusa stepped in and developed some plotting software (the 3279 used a very arcane way of producing graphics, one that was particularly suited to APL's way of reorganizing tables of data) that ran under TSO/APL. His work was highly regarded in Japan, and the main reason that Hitachi got into the APL business as well (there are several stories about that too...). After he left IBM, he did many successful development projects in APL and fostered the APL community in Japan. He was a huge fan and dedicated friend of Ken Iverson - and it is a shame that he has never (to my knowledge) investigated J. You are right that the push and pull within IBM regarding APL was very strange, and sometimes dramatic... - joey At 02:45 +0000 2010/03/08, Ian Clark wrote: >2010/3/7 Björn Helgason <[email protected]>: >> I started out using VM and APL close to 40 years ago. > >Ditto. And in IBM too. > >> Since then IBM has more or less used VM and APL internally but tried >> to get the customers to use some of their other products. > >There's a reason for that. > >As a result of consent decrees meant to prohibit hidden subsidies, IBM >has had to price a product to reflect the development cost. Now >anything developed in VM, APL or some of the really neat streamlined >things IBM has produced in the past, has cost far less to develop than >competing product offerings written in PL/S or whatever mainstream >language IBM uses nowadays. This is down to the fact that it is very >expensive to ship a kludge because of all the debugging it needs. Low >cost is a touchstone of good design: having been shipped on-time and >within budget. > >This means less points for the salesman however, who, if he "controls" >the account" in IBM jargon, can make sure the customer buys the more >expensive offerings. "Integrated" products are a big help here. > >All IBM's products are listed in BOIS, the software catalog, which has >brilliant products to compete with any on the market, including IBM's >own. But the customer never gets to see BOIS, let alone shop from it. >With the correct arm-lock on the salesman, he will go back to BOIS and >pick a cheaper (and often better) product, because fewer points are >better than no points at all. > >Now someone tell me that my information is antiquated and that nothing >like that happens these days. > >Not unconnected with all this, APL has in the past made some pretty >bad enemies inside IBM. Their strongest argument has been that APLers >are apt to promise more than they are able to deliver. A Japanese >IBMer, called Sagusa if memory serves, hit the nail on the head with >"APL enables a programmer to undertake projects beyond his >competence." > >Think about it. If he delivers, was it beyond his competence or not? > >Ian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
