Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

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proprietary: k7, k2/k3 (very frequently used so including them separately), dyalog APL, APL2 (still shipping), APL2000, D

not proprietary: NARS, ngn/k, J, klong, aplette, gnu apl, kona

javascript: ngn/apl, oK

calculator (free software): ivy

dead but the body's still warm (free software): xxl, nial,

dead but the body's still warm (proprietary): aplx, a+

There's a bunch missing here because everyone alive has written an APL interpreter at some point (Ken Thompson did for example but it's ancient history and has a few descendents), but listing all of them would take hours. Especially if we're getting into historical stuff.

They've been pretty heavily studied, though, certainly:

https://vector.org.uk (APL journal going back almost forty years)

If you have access to the old IBM journal, you'll find stuff that's past fifty, the first book on it is 58, and it itself is past sixty now.

re: Nial -still alive - QNIAL latest updates were in 2019 see https://github.com/danlm/qnial7

I don't really see it as still alive: half of the commits in that repo in total were on that day, and only one was a change of code. Before it, the last code change was two years prior.

"Mostly dead" may be more accurate, I'll grant.

A+ has been GPLd for 15 years or so now, and the body has been cooling since 2008 or so when the last change was made IIRC - see http://aplusdev.org

I vaguely remember it was even packaged in Ubuntu multiverse and/or Debian at some point.

Correction now that I'm not on my phone: A+ was GPLed in jan 2001, making this 19 years ago - and indeed, the last change was in 2008 for 64-bit support, but at that point that project had been already quite stagnant for 5-6 years -- changes and releases were all concerned with documentation and newer build environments.

The "electric" GUI concept (The "+" in "A+" - without the GUI it was just called "A") was much simplified in k2 - it was fast, simple and extremely effective even though it didn't really look good - it is, in fact, the only environment I've ever had a chance to use where having a GUI is as simple or simpler than writing a batch program -- see e.g. 15-Puzzle[0] or the spring simulation[1] (even though the canonical example is the S- spreadsheet which you can find at the same site).

[0] http://nsl.com/papers/puzzle15.htm

[1] http://nsl.com/papers/spring.htm

I mean, yeah, it's not very warm, but it, xxl and APLX are pretty much the newest dead APLs.

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