1 Cleanspace is from APL2, courtesy of Jon McGrew.
More Subscription Options:
Godel’s Lost Letter
- How To Make A Polynomial Map Nicer June 12, 2019
- Net-Zero Graphs June 10, 2019
- Raymond Edward Miller Just Passed Away June 8, 2019
Lambda the Ultimate
- Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory April 28, 2019
- "Three Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages" March 19, 2019
- Selective Functors March 5, 2019
Axis of eval
- Peeking into the future with RDP July 12, 2016One aspect of reactive demand programming that sets it apart from other reactive programming models is its support for optimistically working with the predicted future states of signals.Think about a signal that carries the current time in seconds, that you want to display on screen as a clock. The screen should update close to the […]Unknown
- The worm is the spice May 19, 2016Just had a nice insight regarding systems that deal with reactively updating (potentially large, structured) values such as RDP:The dynamic output of a process is indistinguishable from a static storage resource (file).In batch systems like Unix, this symmetry is not so deep: the output stream of a process looks somewhat like a file, but the process […]Unknown
- RESTful RDP with big values August 2, 2015What if you want to use a big value, like a whole database table or weblog, as a Reactive Demand Programming signal value? This would make it possible to use RDP to orchestrate things like incremental MapReduce pipelines. Here's one weird trick to make it work.In effect, each RDP signal becomes a RESTful server, speaking an HTTP-like […]Unknown
S. Padua (Lovelace & Babbage)
- Ada Lovelace Day 2017! October 10, 2017Gooood morning, it’s Ada Lovelace Day! This comic started on Ada Lovelace Day 2009 so every year I celebrate/mourn/as myself “what happened there?” with.. gifs! Feel free to share! In a couple of gif sizes for all your gif needs! (Good job I’m not looking for 2d animation work for lo these…Sydney Padua
- Sexy! Lovelace and Babbage Coming to your screens- September 3, 2017This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Meanwhile..This is an emergency broadcast from 2dGoggles- Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage (the historical ones, or at least a different interpretation of the historical ones) apparently will make a appearance in the tv show Victoria TONIGHT on ITV in the UK- available also online. Synopsis: Having…Sydney Padua
Thank you for the discussions about the observations of APL’s birthday.
I believe that I am the one who started the practice of using the 1 CLEANSPACE date for carbon-dating APL. When I was publishing an internal newsletter within IBM (The APL Jot Dot Times), I was faced at one point with the question of how old APL is– when did it start? I’m sure we could never really give an absolute starting date, because a nearly-endless stream of ideas must have been considered before Iverson Notation came into being. The suggestion that we consider the 1962 date of the book publication to be a starting point is certainly valid. But what I was trying to do was to give a date to the starting point of the APL implementation on computers. Remember that APL is unique among computer languages in that it wasn’t originally written as a computer language– it was written as a means of letting two people converse unambiguously about math concepts. But then, if two people could converse, how about one person and a computer….
For discussions in the newsletter, and later for commemorating an APL at our internal (IBM APL ITL) conferences, it made sense to choose a date of when the first on-line implementation began. So, choosing the date that the first workspace was saved seemed like a reasonable approach. And since that workspace was (and is) still there, that seemed like the way to go. And even if, as Dick Lathwell pointed out, that workspace might have been recreated at one point, that still seemed like a reasonable approach.
Because the on-line implementation of APL as an executable computer langauge is what gave many of us our careers, that is the event that we chose to commemorate. So, many of us from IBM have spoken over the years of 1966-11-27 as being the starting point for APL’s on-line life. And all of the hard implementation work that the developers put into APL prior to that first saved workspace– well, that was pre-birth for APL.
But yes, if you are commemorating the origin of the notation itself, that would certainly be earlier.
My only objection is that now I can’t anymore say APL is a few years older than me! Sadly, I’m the elder sister.
APL celebrated elsewhere: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/notation-and-thinking/
Thank you, Professor Shan. Great article!