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The Origins of APL - 1974
Catherine Lathwell
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.⬐ mellingAn oral history from 50 years ago.I looked up three of the speakers.
Dr Abrams: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_S._Abrams
Roger Moore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Moore_(computer_scient...
And Lawrence Breed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Breed
He died within the past year. We need to interview more of these people before they are gone.
⬐ rak1507That's partially the goal of https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_Campfire and https://www.arraycast.com/
There are lots of software developers out there, that shouldn't be developing software in first place. They could be excellent farmers, musicians, athletes, but for whatever reason they decided to be software developers. And it doesn't matter how many scrums or code reviews you throw at them, they just won't get it. They will be producing miserable results making everyone around them miserable.On the other hand, there still are a few decent, old school devs, who don't need hand-holding, constant poking and distraction of standup meetings and writing meaningless test cases that check if 2+2 is still 4. They just (1) understand the problem and (2) write code that solves it. As simple as that. Good old engineering, like these guys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w. Or original SAS system - its reference manual was better quality then any statistics textbook. Unfortunately those days are gone now and we live in the kingdom of Scrums and Frameworks.
There's a great link in the original comments to a video from 1974, where Iverson, Falkoff, and others discuss the origins of APL. It was a pleasure to watch. A peculiar contrast in language and attitude to today's rockstars and ninjas :)
I recently bought "APL an interactive approach" and read it. It seems that most of the good stuff from APL is already present in modern languages, and better when it's lazy. The OO stuff in APL looks kind of crufty. Still it's a wonderful fascinating language. In the age of mature open-source it feels very old fashioned with the expensiveness of a decent implementation. Btw, this is a fantastic tv segment from days of yore "The Origins of APL - 1974": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w