throwaway7645

Interesting. Did anybody miss the GUI? Sounds strange that it was removed.

The real answer is Arthur Whitney is a god-like being with coding powers beyond the mortal realm. Seriously though they're a lot of stories of his excellent work if you search for them. He's supposedly working on kOS so you can run kdb+ on bare metal. Tiny, fast code is what he does. Sure it might look incomprehensible, but it is a few pages of code he can store in his brain at once. Aaron Hsu (someone has some links to his HN posts on here) explains this with his compiler which converts APL to GPU code. His entire compiler (which he has worked on for a long time) is a handful of pages. He says something like "there's no need for an abstraction if I can see everything at once". Most programming languages have implementations that are very long...which do you think has less bugs? Steve McConnals Code Complete has a statistic somewhere on bugs per 100 loc. That doesn't leave a lot of room in Arthur's code base (although you could say his code being so terse makes it an apples to oranges comparison I guess).

Also important to note is that J is the final language from the inventor of APL (Ken Iverson) who also got the Turing award for APL. J has some advancements from vanilla APL & doesn't require a special keyboard or symbols. Some of these new features were added to Dyalog APL (modern APL with good support). Roger Hui is a well known figure in the APL community. He helped write J and works for Dyalog APL now.

Dyalog appears to be more popular with conferences and more products, but it costs $1k ish for a commercial license and nobody else can run your code without a license and server licenses aren't cheap. It also pretty much needs a special keyboard and a key mapping. J is free for pretty much everything and uses standard characters (although I really like the APL characters). I think they're both nice.

Did they remove a GUI builder for allowing the user to make charts and desktop apps or just a GUI that lets you run the shell?

I guess it's all based on perspective. Comparing to C, D, Nim...etc, it's huge. However, the mathematical model my company exports alone is 10-22 MB alone in just text or binary form (no code), so yeeeaaa I see what you're saying :)

I've used Pandas a bit and it certainly works well, but there are a lot of library functions to learn while J seems to basically be learn the two uses for every symbol and know how to do all math stuff ;).

I'm always impressed to see derivative and both matrix inversion & transpose as elementary operations instead of googling for a library that is most likely poorly documented. Furthermore, since the vector is the basic data type, things like matrices crop up a lot more in J & APL. In Python they are for scientific pursuits. In J they will often crop up even if you're writing a blackjack game. I think this is why it doesn't appeal to many programmers without a strong mathematics background, but it's very appealing to those who have that kind of background and grow tired of writing incessant loops.

In J every symbol is precious and extremely well thought out. The ancestor language "APL" uses its own custom symbols where there the traditional Unicode looking division symbol is used. I really like the APL symbols (there's a video of a guy using the special APL typewriter from the 60s on YouTube), but with J you don't have to worry about installing a special font and buying a keyboard with the symbols written on the right keys. J doesn't precede C in age, but the author/architect (Turing award winner Ken Iverson) had been making large contributions to computing well before C, so he would've had no reason to think "let's make sure as many of my symbols follow C as possible". APL and its descendents are used in industry and have been for decades. Primarily in finance (see KxSystem's awesome KDB+ used by many such as Morgan Stanley), but also in places like Volvo...etc.

Edit: I just re-read my comment and I hope it didn't sound too condescending (not my intent). I'm fairly new to J, but it's pretty cool and I hope you give it a shot if you ever need to do any data oriented tasks.

There's a website article called "Clojure Sucks" that is written by a Common Lisp user who uses a symbolics lisp machine and has some interesting insight although it is very aggressive.

Racket isn't near as fast as SBCL though. However, now that Chez Scheme is open source, Racket is in the process of leveraging that run time. Also I don't know, but would guess deployment is easier with SBCL as it can build a standalone executable (albeit it is very large due to saving the running image).

I disagree.

Vanilla Ice song, Titanic song (my heart will go on), and Hansen Mmmbop might make you cringe, but people went nuts over those songs for a reason. At the time they were amazing. Php might not be the world's greatest language, but at the time it had what people needed in the way they needed it (easy to build websites). Haskell may be objectively better than Php from a language design standpoint, but there is still a LOT that keeps your average Joe/Jane developer from really learning the language (which string library to use as the seemingly default one is really slow, bad IDE support, unpredictable performance due to laziness, monads...etc). You can tell me Haskell is great all day and on paper I would agree, but due to the simple fact that in reality nobody is using it in production or hiring for it (yes some outliers exist), that tells the average person all they need to know. Where is Haskell on tiobe (yes not a perfect source I'm aware, but good enough)? I don't think it even shows up in the top 50 languages. That means drastically reduced employability to many people.

I'm definitely not bashing Haskell btw. I think it's great, but I could also understand a lot of people shying away for good reason.

Or OP's point was the largest company using Haskell only employs 30 Haskell devs. A Haskell proponent will say exactly, you only need a few developers with Haskell, while someone suspicious will say if this tech were truly great more people would use it

OP probably means not for compilers.

Array Programming languages like APL & J are super cool to me and I wish they had more of a following.

J has "tacit programming" where you basically can write hyper general and terse programs with it still being readable. I just wish performance was more in line with Java.

Yea...I should've asked in addition to that.

A little off topic:

I've been considering system76 for awhile. I see Dell also offers Linux laptops now and has for awhile. Any reason why I should pick system76?

I agree with you. Not super useful for day to day stuff, but still fun and enlightening.

Thanks for the gems. It's been awhile since I've been to the HP Museum page. The Circuit Solver example is pretty cool, but that is a lot of keystrokes haha:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/software/41/41elcirc.htm

Thanks for the reply! It was a very interesting read for sure. The polar->rectangular conversions can be done with an $15 Casio FX-115ES from Walmart pretty easily although RPN is much nicer than scrolling around a bunch when the equations get long. He might already know that, or find it interesting. I've never heard of an Oliveti vacuum tube machine, but will look it up. The IBM 360 machine he mentioned is probably not that different to what we do today (I bet the software has only changed in minor placed). The biggest difference is it's moved to Nix or Windows and off the mainframe and we can simulate massive scale problems in seconds. Of course that means we steadily increase the scope of the problem until you get a process that takes 24 hours ;). I'm impressed with anyone who can use a slide-rule for anything more complex than multiplication. Props to your dad btw. I love my job and it's fascinating to see how past engineers managed to essentially do the same things with tools that seem archaic today. I guess this is similar to modern day software engineers on HN getting really excited bout the Xerox Alto Smalltalk machine & the Symbolics Lisp Machines. The past is neat.

I think that's an excellent view of the tradeoffs between the two.

Awesome...same as me. I'd love to hear how they did things in more resource constrained times.

I also have a hobby interest in HP calcs (own a 15-c), so double interest here. Not sure if you're a blogger, but that is some legitimate history with the early usage of handheld computing to aid science & engineering. A blog post would be great, but I'd settle on a reply here.

Thanks for correcting my mistake! It's def better than most I signed up for!

Norvig is a beast. For those that don't know, he is high up in Google Research (AI director I believe) and also wrote the #1 AI textbook. He has the #1 AI course on coursera or edx too (can't remember which one). He's a big lisp advocate (look at his review of SICP on amazon), but also has the programs for his books in Java, and Python.

Same thing with my dad, but at university level as he could write engineering programs to help with homework and avoid booking time on the mainframe.

Btw: Would you please ask your father what type of calculations he ran on his calc as a power systems engineer? Fortran would've been around for state-estimation and contingency analysis by that time if he was in transmission. For distribution I could see him doing fault analysis or calculating line parameters. If he was on the generation side I'm not really sure what he'd be calculating (not my area). Of course utilities were fully vertically integrated during that time frame, so he could have done a mixture.

I work with traditional RDBMS & and old hierarchical linked-list DB. The linked-list has great performance with super speedy Fortran, but it is a major pain to retrieve any information. Having to write complicated pointer commands is tedious at best. Select * is such a luxury.

The stuff with FERC & DOE is a little more complex. Nobody likes coal, and the north American electricity market mechanisms have had prices for years that are too low for coal to turn a profit. Great, the market has spoken you say? The only problem is it presents a major issue for national security if all you have is natural gas and some renewable. What happens if the pipelines freeze? Grid resiliency means having a diverse enough fuel mix to still be ok if we have certain disasters. One day we'll hopefully have very large and affordable batteries and a lot more renewables, but despite huge growth in this sector, most demand is still sourced from unclean fossil fuels today. Nobody (except Perry) is really expecting or wanting coal to make a comeback. They're just trying to provide a market mechanism to compensate power companies to keep just enough coal online so we can better hedge against blackouts.

Jane Street is probably an exception.

Not sure bout netstat, but I pipe text to | head and use the -n flag to specify # of lines all the time.

I dunno.

UNIX and thus Linux are all about pure user power. The shell is great and there are lots of tools available by default like Awk, Perl, Python, TCL, Sed, GCC, Vim, Emacs...etc. The entire OS isn't perfect, but is designed for people who know what they're doing. Compare that with CMD & Batch and it is Linux is like an SUV that can also fly and shoot lasers while Windows is like a moped. Of course I'm exaggerating a good bit, but even Powershell has a lot of issues and doesn't allow you to easily do what you can in Linux. In Linux everything is text and it's easy to pipe things around. In Windows it's all objects and frustration. I agree that Smalltalk on the Alto is pretty cool, but Windows is nothing like that besides having some OO stuff. Something I do all the time on Linux is "locate filename" and pipe that to "grep" to be more specific. On Windows, open up the search Window and pray you can narrow it down or wait a very long time.

I use Windows and Linux at work. On Linux I feel like everything is designed to increase my productivity as are the tools at my disposal. On Windows, I'm always fighting the lack of good tools. Sure Visual Studio + .NET is pretty good if that is your thing, but I personally don't like having to open an IDE that uses that kind of resources if I essentially need to write a simple script. I've spent quite a bit of time with Powershell, but it simply isn't as productive as Linux due to the increased complexity. Sorry for the rant, but as i spend a lot of time with both OS, I have strong feelings on this.