Re:Fear and Loathing in APL (2015)
by grayrest on Sunday March 04, 2018 @04:06PM
(#16516734)
> Has anyone ever programmed anything sizable in it?
A significant fraction of wall street operates on kdb+, which is a commercial programming environment in Q (a dialect of K), which is APL derived.
APL derived languages operate with a different idea of what makes a programming language good and there was an APL patterns presentation [0] posted yesterday. In brief, the goal is to be able to see and manipulate the entire solution to a problem at once instead of isolating subproblems into layers and abstractions.
I wouldn't write a web browser in Q but I've done enough daily programming problems in it that I can see how it'd be useful for writing programs in what would be the 3-5k LoC of Python range.
A significant fraction of wall street operates on kdb+, which is a commercial programming environment in Q (a dialect of K), which is APL derived.
APL derived languages operate with a different idea of what makes a programming language good and there was an APL patterns presentation [0] posted yesterday. In brief, the goal is to be able to see and manipulate the entire solution to a problem at once instead of isolating subproblems into layers and abstractions.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16513393
I wouldn't write a web browser in Q but I've done enough daily programming problems in it that I can see how it'd be useful for writing programs in what would be the 3-5k LoC of Python range.