How to get there from here ...The objective of this website is to make people who are visiting this site, including myself, aware of the power of certain programming languages that changed my life. My background is Actuarial Science and when I first learned APL, I immediately realized the usefulness of Ken Iverson’s notation for my actuarial work. Quote: "APL is a language for describing procedures in the processing of information. It can be used to describe mathematical procedures having nothing to do with computers, or to describe (to a human being) the way a computer works. Most commonly, however, at least at this time, it is used for programming in the ordinary sense of directing a computer to process numeric or alphabetic data. The language was invented by Kenneth E. Iverson while at Harvard University. The language, originally titled "Iverson Notation", was designed to overcome the inherent ambiguities and points of confusion found when dealing with standard mathematical notation. It was later described in 1962 in a book simply titled "A Programming Language" (hence APL). Towards the end of the sixties, largely through the efforts of IBM, the computer community gained its first exposure to APL. Iverson received the Turing Award in 1980 for this work. APL is a user-oriented notation, particularly well suited for communication from people to other people or to computers. The notation consists of a set of symbols (letters, numbers, punctuation, algebra, and special shapes), with a very simple set of rules (syntax) for putting them together to describe the processing of data." Please, read more at http://www.sigapl.org/whyapl.htm Adrian & Duncan of Causeway (at http://www.causeway.co.uk) added to that a flashing Windows-development tool for it, and you might look at the result in http://www.ganuenta.com/annuity.exe . APL-like programming languages are still a promising tool for this entire century and applications are found in any thinkable technical industry, like (life-)insurance, pharmacy, petro chemistry, &c, &c. In the eighties of the past century it was said that, although not every life-insurance company was using it in practice, every such a company was aware of the existence of APL. Famous example also is Janssen Pharmacy, Belgium. It's not exaggerated to say that the success of Janssen's company was due to the APL-programming environment. They could develop more patents on medicines than any of its competitors. Porting APL-applications has always been a problem because of the relatively large interpreter (1,2Mb) and large workspaces. With nowadays power on every PC this problem has been evaporated. In the meantime Arthur Whitney, founder/owner of Kx-Systems (at http://www.kx.com), designed his K-interpreter. K is a programmer’s delight. The five programs under "sample applications | k-scripts | …" fit on a single diskette, including the interpreter itself (5 Kb) and the pertaining *.dll (180Kb). Especially his relational database system kdb/q is an insatiable omnivore and incomparable with any other database system, able to capture, analyze, compare and store unlimited streaming and historical data in seconds. Take a few minutes to browse through the applications, articles and other related and loose topics. It is appreciated to let me know your findings. Jan Karman - Middelburg (The Netherlands), January 2006/September 2010 |