Terrence Brannon wrote:
I'm curious about the relative popularity of the different members of
the array-processing family of languages. And we can segment
popularity into 3 domains: hobby, academic, corporate.
Here are all the array languages that have a large attention (from my
admittedly ignorant viewpoint):
APL - ?
K - corporate consulting primarily
J - large hobby following, one major corporation (ISI), some
non-research-track academic use (e.g. Clifford Reiter)
A+ - primarily 1 corporation (MSDW)
Other related languages include Lucid, Field, and Qnial. Are there others?
some others:
Basis - used in physics
Fortran 90 - added array programming constructs, science and engineering
IDL - popular in astronomy and physics
Matlab - widely used in engineering
NumPy (Numeric Python) - science and engineering
SmartArrays gives C++ and Java
And I wonder why there is an APL conference when Ken Iverson himself
admitted that J was an improvement over APL. Is APL better in certain
ways?
I believe Ken saw J as a better dialect of APL, not something
fundamentally different. Not everyone in the APL community agreed. Many
prefer the APL character set and as Raul said, once you have a large
investment in a body of code in any language, it's hard to abandon it
for another language, even though it might be better. APL2007 provides
a forum for all array programming languages, not just classic APL. J
contributions are most welcome.
What support for parallel computing exists in the array-based languages?
Presuming that you mean support for parallel hardware, I'd say the
answer is not enough. Most array languages are optimized for commodity
hardware which has had limited parallelism. That has begun to change,
but there are a variety of parallel hardware architectures and it is
unclear which one(s) should be supported. Fortran 90 probably has more
support for legacy parallel hardware than anything else.
# Steve
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