throwaway7645

I hear it has an excellent and very fair licensing model too, besides the fact that it has templates for everything. Want to write an FPS? They have a template for it.

Early Smalltalk and Lisp systems were those langs all the way down. Using emacs with Common Lisp or using Pharo Smalltalk can give you a feel for this, but not exactly the same thing as a Symbolics lisp machine or the Xerox Alto. Alan Kay has a presentation where he shows the entire OS, word processor, networking stuff, IDE, paint programs...etc was an insanely small amount of code and everything was user configurable. I really wish that had caught on more. I really enjoy Linux (although it ain't perfect). Using Windows and trying to interactively do anything with the OS is an exercise in pain and frustration. If someone could build a modern machine with an OS that is like that and had a few basic apps (web browser...etc), I would be quite happy.

Only partly...it has lots of suffixes and prefixes for pretty much everything too. They says it's nearly impossible for a foreigner to learn (of course not true).

Agreed. I think critical thinking in philosophy is useful, but you have to keep in mind the critical thinking skills learned in a typical engineering degree: advanced math classes more advanced math classes applying mathematics to engineering problems programming learning to take general math concepts and apply to large intermixed problems working solo and on teams *4 years of living in a library studying, doing homework, and doing more studying

I learned a lot under those conditions.

The language is probably in the top 3 for hardest to learn. Not sure of the 3D stuff.

I don't look know that I know where everything is, but I'm guessing it takes awhile to learn where 72 weird APL symbols go when you're first learning you know?

They also routinely steal blueprints to US technology as well as the rest of the world. They make billions in IP theft annually. I'm not saying they can't innovate (being one of the first advanced civilizations), but they're currently so behind in many areas that corporate espionage + cheap knockoff is super profitable. Why spend billions in R&D?

National security?

Sounds like a lot of fluff added because some people want a slower ramp. I think there just needs to be more example material out there for beginners.

People realize that of course, but I don't think simply buying keycaps is an option for everyone. Will they work with my slightly non standard ergonomic keyboard?

Agreed on the keyboard thing. Dyalog sells an APL keyboard, but it isn't ergonomic, which I need.

I think "/" is a good symbol for map as it is easy access.

True that J & K do, but Dyalog doesn't and is pretty modern in that it is still very actively developed...interfaces to Python/R, runs on Raspberry Pi, hooks into .NET, can run on GPU...etc.

APL has used a huge set of non ASCII characters for more than 30 years in production by large companies.

There was a big HackerNews thread on Pixie awhile back with the author Tim Baldrige and why he eventually stopped the project. A neat idea.

Was Forth just for debugging the hardware, or did the full thing run in Forth?

I found the opposite to be true.

Agreed that having to drop to .NET is a fail. So usually when trying to learn to do file I/O in a new language you google it. The first few examples I came across were slow and when I looked into it, it was doing as this example did. It's been awhile, but it wasn't obvious how to do it with a stream without resorting to a C# esque version which at that point, you might as well use C#. I'm not sure why there isn't a PS oneliner option like Python's with statement. I really like the idea of PS, but some simple things are more trouble than they're worth.

Thanks for the analysis. This is one of my main PS issues in that all the obvious ways are in fact wrong. I tried 3-4 different file write methods before and all were unbearably slow.

This is pretty impressive. Powershell has been pretty slow for a lot of my uses lately. The author said this took ~30 secs. How long would a similar script take in Python? They're both slow on the language performance spectrum, but I bet Python would be significantly faster if anyone is less lazy than me to actually write some code.

Out of curiosity...what are the other langs and what is the business you're in? Python is a great language for a lot of uses, but obviously not everything.

Yea...not in the visible spectrum, so you have to be imaginative. Famous theoretical physicist kip Thorne (expert on black holes) uses Mathematica to take an image of space and use the equations for black holes to warp the images used for things like the Interstellar movie.

I was just referring to going to Chez as the backend...happy it is moving along.

Yea, but make another Snow White and if she LOOKS like the Disney version, you're going to have a bad time.

Glad to hear this hasn't stalled.

Haha, thanks Gregg! Glad to hear that people do. I hope Red catches on and you can use that for everything (my intent if it works out)!

I love his 60 bazillion sites. I've seen his stuff on lulu as well, but I wished he went into more detail on some of the apps at times. I can mostly follow along, but stuff like rebtris is pretty terse in a way (lot of functionality in one spot).

I've seen you on the Rebol/Red forums...do you get paid to write Rebol?

I think Red could find some momentum with blockchain, but I'm not sure how many people will go for yet another ICO, although I'm very ignorant in that area. As long as they keep chugging along I'm happy though. One day I'd love to be able to use Red for nearly all my computing needs.

Seconded...good talk!

How is C++ more productive than Lisp? Sheer library power?