bear8642

> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM

I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…

> "[Phoenix] repackages off-the-shelf semiconductors into devices that are virtually identical to the phased-out chips."

I'm slightly surprised that _virtually_ identical chips are allowed. I expected truly identical chips to be required…

Thanks for sharing that!

> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.

A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…

How so?

I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...

For a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]

It's been discussed here before too.

[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html

> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regression

Indeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...

> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)

How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?

> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x

The adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.

oh, thanks! I didn't know that Prolog was still used commercially.

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

> Humans trust. Their systems should too.

And indeed as Thompson showed, you've got to trust at some point...

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/R209/Reflections-Trus...

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

Cool story - thanks for sharing it!

This is exceedingly nasty. Well Done!

more the names then the functions themselves

They sort of did with the Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)

huh, can you not use the Xkb APL symbols file?

I thought that compose definitions as well as the shifted layout…

Right, thank you!

I recognised the " as rank but got confused by the _ reading https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/under, it seemed to be 'rank negative' and didn't see what that did.

> second nature once you internalize J, but so so foreign until you do.

Indeed!

> Vs=: 4r3p1"_ * ] ^ 3:

What's the "_ for?

Average is zero

     empty =. 0$0 NB. zero length array
     +/empty
  0
     #empty
  0
     0%0
  0

Yep, the office has a p9 box and normally the only times it's needed rebooted is after a power cut.

Very solid boxes!

> PRs are emails to your team and to your future self.

Indeed! I've found many point on this discussion answered by the linux kernel idea of mailing lists where a change is discussed then approved, often with feedback acknowledged

Remember, simple is not the same easy

5 characters?

I thought it was normally six 6bit characters?

> Sometimes it is called a fluent-interface in other languages.

Where've you heard it called that? I've normally heard tacit programming

>Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what `.split(None)` would do?

Reading the docs [0] it seems `.split(None)` returns an array of the indivual characters without whitespace - so something like [c in list(s) if not whitespace(c)]

[0] https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=...

> How is it to read and write?

Fairly straight-forward once you've learnt the character set.

See here for details: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Typing_glyphs

If you want some excitement, 9front might be fun :)

Thinkpads tend to be well supported

> simply making a normal OS look like a virtual machine

Or perhaps the other way around?

That is making VMs totally unaware they've been virtualised, as I believe IBM's lpars work…