Everything Else

I was still doing work on TSX-11, VMS, DOS, Concurrent DOS, MP/M-86 (*) and XEMIX in that era, No idead even Windows existed until early 1990s whenI I was building 386 and 486s PCs at a small shop.

R.

* and a few other things I don't clearly recall. There was all kinds of (often weird) DOS clones which were multi-user over thick ethernet and stuff.. Its all so long ago now and everything has changed so much. Other things like NeXT were completely absent and university still had a DECsystem-10 with teletypes...

ugh, i'll never code for windows. i'll hire someone else to do it. someone with windows "principle windows flunky" experience.

Does anybody know APL? I heard once about it from a retired mechanical engineering business owner who used it before the age of graphics CAD.

I use xmonad on my openbsd laptop (P1mmx 233mhz toshiba). It is a lovely experience. xmonad is written in haskell (and must be configured in haskell, which is the only exposure I've had before/since to the language...)

At the time tiling managers were becoming popular and DWM was all the rage in my circles. But I could never get over the incredibly arrogant attitude of the DWM community enough to use it. From their main page "keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions." As a novice user I quickly ran away to xmonad

I have mine, top left desk drawer!

Funny you should mention that ... I had APL/2 for a while, played with it a little. APL will do graphical CAD, there was a guy who was creating spiral bevel surfaces with APL, must have been about 1990 ? And there is an Irix version of APL also, came from Morgan-Stanley I believe. I have it somewhere if you can't find it. Interesting system. Does it still hold the record for "most undecipherable code ever" ?

I started with QBasic at 9, moved up to Visual Basic a few years later and kinda got stuck in that rut for longer than I wanted. It wasn't until I was 13-14 I started picking up C and diving through the Doom source code and picked up C++ in High School through free time/high school classes. Got into PHP and MySQL at 17, got really advanced in it in my free time to the point where I got a professional PHP/Oracle job based on a CMS I built from scratch at 21.

Since then it's been mainly C# (WinForms/WPF/WCF/ASP.NET/MonoTouch/WP7) and MS SQL Server, with an occasional PHP script here or there. But I have been diving into IronPython the last week or two.

Been debating on whether or not to get back into C++ since a bunch of jobs I have been looking through are C#/C++, which I found kind of interesting. To be honest I've gotten very used to C# handling as much as it does.

Irix binaries for Morgan-Stanley's A+ are available at http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/index.html; the source [compiles nicely] can be downloaded as well.

In the late 1970s I worked for both of the then most important APL providers, I. P. Sharp Sharp APL and STSC APL*PLUS , and at my next working place IBM's APL2 - not APL/2 - was used until the mid-1990s when C was taking over slowly.

BTW, I still have the IBM PC APL2 version running on my HP 200LX - not the fastest thing around, but possibly the smallest APL machine there is

Regarding "most undecipherable code ever" - of course, I'm biased, but I'd much more difficulties with J, though...

For undecipherable, try Brainfuck.

.tsooJ

The version that ran on OS/2 was called ... wait for it !! drumroll, please ... APL/2. Like most everything else that ran on OS/2 ....

We only used mainframes with APL2; we never used any OS-half stuff...

just run GnuAPL. it's just as much fun but without the nifty keyboard. I studied it, used it, and like so many other things in life with not practical application, prompty forgot it.

There were some useful applications, but I never got smart enough to figure them out There was a guy generating pretty complex geometry with APL/2 and the graphics package IBM created for it. Also, apparently Morgan-Stanley used it a lot for statistics and so on ... not that I can approve of that but still If it didn't need a special keyboard it might have been more popular. Also, it's interpreted so if you don't have an interpreter, you're screwed. Coulda woulda shoulda been what Java became, maybe. It's pretty neat but .... so is Rexx. I wonder why Rexx never became very popular ? It's much nicer than Basic and not much harder to learn.

REXX was the scripting language for the Amiga, so it saw some moderate action. But BASIC pre-dates it and was the default language for most micros during the 70s to late-80s, so that may have something to do with its popularity.

Might not be as unpractical as you think, though: APL is still used today quite a lot indeed. In fact, it is even nowadays accepted at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/phd/fields/ ... index.html . I certainly would not feel ok if I had to write financial, actuarial or statistical programs in Fortran, Pascal or C, no.

Regarding the "nifty" keyboard. Granted, unless you have a proper APL keyboard, it takes a few minutes to get used to the location of all them funny symbols [it's just a question of your flexibility]. Actually, APL versions exist which utilise keywords instead of symbols [which, in my opinion, destroys the elegance of APL completely], and ASCII transliterations have been devised as well [which are even worse, see J].

BTW, APL influenced the design of a few other languages: 4.2.6 in the original Mathematica book lists some correspondences between APL and Mathematica. And Nial is a cross of APL and LISP [quite a few years ago I'd contributed an Irix port; while not so important, its Reference Manual is the best I've ever come across].

Lastly, back in the '80s, e.g. I wrote, purely in APL, an interface to RAMIS II [the DBMS we then utilised] - you could retrieve data, manipulate them in APL in ways no DBMS will ever provide facilities for, and upload the results afterwards...My staff liked it.

of course.

Get flexible enough and you can become spineless ! See "Uncle Tom" ....

Yeah we know it doesn't run on PCs. But there are a few dozen billion lines elsewhere. The guys writing it don't get paid much but it beats being a web developer.

I don't know it any more but I used to use it a little. You need a special keyboard for it so if you don't have one you get bored quickly. After I left the school where they were set up for I haven't seen it since. It's a pretty neat language, and very old. I understand actuaries still use it but I don't know who else does. I can see where it would be good for CAD since it has operators for matrix and vector operations but now pretty much anybody who needs that stuff just calls a library.

It's a nice language for doing quick math stuff sort of like Perl or Tcl are for writing quick utility scripts. APL makes Perl look verbose

The idea of major financial systems running on APL is a bit scary.

I ran into someone else today who also learnt RPG-II on the System/36.
Without the correct form editor that was something that really did look like line noise and makes APL look verbose.

R.

RPG isn't a computer language in the sense that most people think of computer languages. It's a positional Report Program Generator. IBM has come up with a few other systems like that, including DMS. Again, they're application generators , not proper languages. If IBM hadn't put out RPG about the same time they put out COBOL, it would probably have been accepted on the esolang website