Re: Programming?

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

"Ralph M. Deal" <deal@kzoo.edu> wrote:
>Let me jump into this harrangue without reading all of it, even though
>that is quite un-PC.  
I don't think we DO "PC" around here, so you're quite welcome.

>I love LISP and taught it to non-majors in a computer science course
>partly because it was so different from any programming languages my
>students may have had earlier and so stretched all minds.  So I'd like to
>see LISP as a learning language.
LISP is in many ways a classic CS language, and I would quite agree that it
can be used to teach some important topics, such as parsing and list processing.
Common LISP and the renewed interest in LISP over the last 5-10 years is in
many ways similar to what is going on with APL. Both of these are rather old
languages whose advocates and vendors tried to sell based ont he base language
itself. As things have developed, libraries and interfaces are at least as
important as the core language, and CLISP was the result of people cooperating
and (in essense) re-launching the language and the ideas it embodied. I'm 
pleased
to see how successful this has been.

>Secondly, I can't believe this advocacy of APL.
Hey, it's no LESS beleivable than the notion that some grad student comes outta
Scandanavia someplace and (despite critcal comments from his professors, and 
the laughter or derision of the entire computer indistry)) puts the basis of a 
new
OS on the Internet, which just happens to be growing where and when it will do 
that fledgling OS a lot of good, and people start donating their time to....

What's not to believe?

>I didn't think anyone younger than 65 knew what APL was much less use it.
I know twentysomethings who qre quite proficient at APL, and making a bit more
than a decent living at it, too. I taught some of 'em!

Actually, over the last few years, and arm of ACM devoted to APL has conducted a
survey of its members. The most frequent cause people had for leaving the 
organi-
zation was retirement, so you're not TOO far off base. Once concern was that 
members were leaving to work on other languages, but apparently that's not the 
case.

>Am I corrent in thinking you mean 'A Programming Language' of ancient Bell
>Labs fame, ...
There WAS an APL system developed at Bell labs, the author was Ken Thompson.
He was finishing it up when his boss called hin in one day, told him to stop
playing around with compilers and programming languages (he was helping some-
one named Kernigan with a language called "C" , a BCPL deriviative) and do
something serious.

That project turned into UNIX. Actually, there are ideas from APL in UNIX, but
that's another story.

However, by that time, APL was nearly ten years old!

>developed by Eric ____ ?  
Actually, APL was developed principally by a fellow named Kenneth Iverson. He
has a SON named Eric.

>Used to be a favorite of those seeking compact code.
That's true, there were APL coders who took special delight in writing the
most compact possible code that did so much in so little space no one could
understand it. In retrospect, these people did give APL a bad name, and
(as we can see!) a bad name can take a long time to live down.

The coding style that is encouraged these days is more open, with comments
and shorter lines of code, fewer "tricks" and more clarity. This goes a long
way toward helping APL applications become easy to maintain.

There is also an "Obfuscated C contest" with code that IMPOSSIBLE to read unless
you know the compiler directives! APL programmers didn't invent obscure program-
ming; writing for clarity is something we all have to learn as programmers.

>	Looking forward to scathing remarks,
From who?

I've kind of heard a wee bit about LOGO, but never actually saw or used it.
What does it (in the opinions of those experienced at it) does it bring to
the table?

                                                           Regards,
                                                           ---> RGB <---