wikipedia APL page revamp - wiki draft

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Draft of wikipedia APL prog lang article

APL is an acronym for A Programming Language - it is based on a strict (unambiguous) mathematical notation invented by the late Kenneth E Iverson; it is an interpreted, interactive, and array oriented commercial language available for all contemporary platforms. Amongst programming languages, APL has several unique/exclusive hallmarks:

• It is culture 'neutral'; it uses symbols rather than 'reserved' keywords.
• It is solution 'focussed'; it promotes the expression of algorithms without any consideration of machine architecture or operating system - APL is a type 'inferred' language that rarely necessitates coding structures for loops.
• It has just one 'simple' operator precedence rule: all expressions evaluate from right to left; if necessary, this default can be overrridden by enclosing parts of an expression in round brackets, with innermost sets of brackets imposing the highest level of precedence.

It was an important influence on the development of spreadsheets, functional programming[1], Mathematica and MatLab[2], and its descendents J[3], K[4] & q[4].

The language flourishes in scientific[5], actuarial[6], statistical[7] and financial[8] applications, and is favored by domain experts writing software for their own purposes. APL is also associated with rapid and lightweight development projects in volatile business environments.

Recent notable extensions to APL interpreters and IDEs include:

• anonymous lambdas[9]

• support for class/object programming
  

• support .Net assemblies
• APL as a native .NET language using Visual Studio 2008 [10]
• ActiveX or COM Interrop support allowing APL to use Windows resources, notably the operating system's Shell, Win32 APIs, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation),as well as any COM aware applications, including the MS Office suite.
• XML-array conversion primitives [11]

References

[1] ACM Award Citation – John Backus. 1977
[2] The Growth of MatLab - Cleve Moler
[3] insert ref to J-software
[4] insert ref to Kx-Systems
[5] http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v233/webber.htm
[6] insert ref to actuarial (?)
[7] insert ref to statistical (?)
[8] insert ref to financial (?)
[9] Dynamic Functions in Dyalog APL - John Scholes. 1997
[10] insert ref to Visual APL
[11] insert ref to APLX & Dyalog []XML here!

End of article

Deletions

APL is one of the oldest programming languages, It is a dynamic, interpreted language based on Iverson's mathematical notation. All data are arrays. Primitive operations all extend to arrays, and are denoted by distinctive graphic symbols rather than words, making APL programs compact and visually striking, with few or no loops.

* support for Subversion and Unicode text handling

Comments

• APL is an acronym for A Programming Language

First, it isn't an acronym, which is a word whether made up or not. It's an abbreviation or initialism. More importantly it doesn't warrant being mentioned in the introduction. It's History! -- PhilLast 2009-07-29 00:15:27

• ActiveX or COM Interrop support allowing APL to use Windows resources, notably the operating system's Shell, Win32 APIs, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation),as well as any COM aware applications, including the MS Office suite.

is far too long for a bullet point. Could the author reduce it to between 2 & 10 words and add a reference in the reference section? -- PhilLast 2009-07-29 00:15:27

I am a trifle worried by the direction this is going - possibly an effect of working on this online rather than face-to-face. At the meeting on Friday we were able to use the time to discuss/hone/agree, the five (can I count correctly?) of us had a discussion of direction that is perhaps not explicit in the proposed text.

At risk of being tedious I think that to get a revised introductory paragraph together we need to understand our intent (which, I think, is to present APL the way we see it - as a living and evolving entity; certainly we need to get ourselves out of the rut of so many well-worn arguments).

I am also musing what should come after the introductory paragraph - I think that history should be consigned to the past. I'd like to see a couple of sections, one that tells "the management" what their enterprise should gain by including APL in their IT arsenal, and another that shows programmers/problemsolvers why APL is a good tools to use.

I'm saying these things because my view is that someone using the Wikipedia wants to learn "about something" rather than "the history of something".

Sorry to be counterproductive - but it may be that head-to-head is a quicker way to get where we want to be than pecking away at words on a page.

Also apologising if I'm breaking the rules/exhortations about comments here - Dick Bowman (27 July 2009).

• It is culture 'neutral'; it uses symbols rather than 'reserved' keywords.

Really? The manuals are still available in English only. All System commands and System variables are English. All workspaces delivered by vendors are English-centric as well. I don't think it's a good idea to claim that. I cannot see a Chinaman withouth English language skills learning APL. -- KaiJaeger 2009-07-26 08:04:22

• The language flourishes in ...

Flourishing?! Certainly not. "APL is still used in..." or "APL is used in..." seems to me much more appropriate.

• and is favored by domain experts

Favoured by Domain Experts?. Certainly not. There is a whole range of programming languages available which focus on that. Some of them are quite successful. Almost all of them are more successful than APL in total.

What I am missing is a remark about the most important enhancements: Namespaces in Dyalog and integrated debuggers in some implementation. -- KaiJaeger 2009-07-26 08:04:22

• Put one in then. -- PhilLast 2009-07-29 00:15:27

The word "seamlessly" is hard to justify in a Wikipedia article. It works when the type declarations delivered by the authors of the COM thing are correct. If not it won't. Often they are not, including some from Microsoft.

• the offending word seems to have been removed