On 6/5/2011 7:06 PM, David Leibs wrote:
I love APL! Learning APL is really all about learning the idioms and
how to apply them. This takes quite a lot of training time. Doing
this kind of training will change the way you think.
Alan Perlis quote: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think
about programming, is not worth knowing."
not everyone wants to learn new things though.
very often, people want to get the job done as their main priority, and
being faced with new ideas or new ways of doing things is a hindrance to
the maximization of productivity (or, people may see any new/unfamiliar
things as inherently malevolent).
granted, these are not the sort of people one is likely to find using a
language like APL...
a lot depends on who ones' market or target audience is, and whether or
not they like the thing in question. if it is the wrong product for the
wrong person, one isn't going to make a sale (and people neither like
having something being forced on them, nor buying or committing
resources to something which is not to to their liking, as although
maybe not immediate, this will breed frustration later...).
it doesn't mean either the product or the potential customer is bad,
only that things need to be matched up.
it is like, you don't put sugar in the coffee of someone who likes their
coffee black.
There is some old analysis out there that indicates that APL is
naturally very parallel. Willhoft-1991 claimed that 94 of the 101
primitives operations in APL2 could be implemented in parallel and
that 40-50% of APL code in real applications was naturally parallel.
R. G. Willhoft, Parallel expression in the apl2 language, IBM Syst. J.
30 (1991), no. 4, 498–512.
not personally dealt with APL, so I don't know.
I sort of like having the ability to write code with asynchronous
operations, but this is a little different. I guess a task for myself
would be to determine whether or not what I am imagining as 'async' is
equivalent to the actor model, hmm...
decided to leave out a more complex elaboration.
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