we had a discussion about this language at work... Who works with that today?
Don't we normally favor readability over smallest number of lines?
Okay...I've gotta know what that means...! :)
Drew Hall
2008-11-29 04:57:15
@Drew: I just stole a snippet from Wikipedia's APL article. They say it finds all primes from 1 to R. Beyond that, I know nothing about APL (took a course on it in university, but no memory remains).
Michael Burr
2008-12-01 18:41:03
+7
A:
Contact folks in SigAPL for an answer.
DMOZ has some links on APL, including user groups.
APL is not that obscure. Some algorithms are expressed naturally. Some aren't, of course, but some are.
One problem is the one-liner syndrome. See here for a great quote.
APL one-liners are like carving a wire from marble. It demonstrates your skill at carving, but is not a good use of marble.
S.Lott
2008-11-29 04:10:40
The same is certainly true of J. I tend to write J in a more "accessible" style.
Gregory Higley
2010-06-24 21:01:11
+3
A:
Yeah baby! I'm using it in the financial industry.
Don't we normally favor readability over smallest number of lines?
Just because it has a small number of lines doesn't mean it's not readable. It's just so easy and concise to express ideas in APL, what you'd normally do in a function, you do in APL in one line. Trying to do the same thing in another language would be way more complicated. I've had a bit of a hard time when I've gone back to using "normal" languages for a few things, they seem so cumbersome in some ways.
'Readability' is a bit of a misnomer anyway, you don't 'read' code like a book, it's more like decoding or decrypting something, as Joel mentioned in his blog some time ago. Even VB code is a lot simpler to write than it is to read.
There are some active APL groups out there, like the dyalogusers Yahoo group (Dyalog is an APL vendor).
Curyous
2008-11-29 04:37:33
+1
A:
Love/use regular expression? Do you?? Needs skill to read and maintain them, does it? So does APL.
Ever looked at quantum mechanics formulas? Readable?! Well...
What one considers reable depends on two things: your skills and how much is going to happen. In one line of APL a lot of things can be done. If you expect that line to be as readable as a line of Cobol, say, something is wrong. With you, not with APL.
To get an impression look at this and have fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=a9xAKttWgP4&fmt=18