by Doug_Bohrer » Sat Jan 23, 2016 5:48 pm
I first learned how to program in APL as a high school student in 1968. I used APL interpreters professionally from 1978 until about 2006. The main advantage was that it coded up very fast. The main disadvantage was that it was very inefficient on single core Turing machines. I used it for applications that were complex, but did not run very often. Usually that meant accounting, corporate planning or investment managed account systems. All during that time, the APL community thought that when the hardware went massively parallel, APL would become the natural choice for programming because it was inherently parallel. That's how I stumbled on to your posts. Are people using your APL for development work? Did you connect the interpreter for prototyping code which could then be compiled after it was debugged? I am really curious about the usage of APL because it looks like most of the world is struggling to adapt languages designed for Turing machines to work in the parallel environment. I think that's a fool's errand. Doug Bohrer
Doug Bohrer
Chicago, IL