1 Cleanspace is from APL2, courtesy of Jon McGrew.
More Subscription Options:
Godel’s Lost Letter
- The Right Stuff of Emptiness February 23, 2015
- Ada the Amplifier February 17, 2015
- Still A Brilliant Idea February 7, 2015
Lambda the Ultimate
- A theory of changes for higher-order languages — incrementalizing λ-calculi by static differentiation February 4, 2015
- John C Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award nominations for 2014 November 26, 2014
- Zélus : A Synchronous Language with ODEs November 22, 2014
Axis of eval
- Attack of the Monadic Morons June 22, 2014[Deleted. To be replaced with a proper rant at another time.]Manuel Simoni
- Obsession with mathematics June 18, 2014To put it bluntly, the discipline of programming languages has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. PL researchers are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of intereManuel Simoni
- A week of Lisp in Madrid June 10, 2013Jose Maria CuellarGeeks from all Lisps of life met in Madrid last week for the European Common Lisp Meeting and European Lisp Symposium 2013.A lot of things happened, so I'll just recount the most memorable ones.I enjoyed meeting Pascal Costanza and Charlotte Herzeel. Pascal shares my disdain for the aberration that is Lisp-1 and doesn't tire of teManuel Simoni
S. Padua (Lovelace & Babbage)
- Book Tour, UK Publishers, Pretty Stars, Giant Monsters! February 7, 2015I can’t recall why I made this gif of Lovelace and Babbage as penguins a while back but it seems it set some spheniscidaelian vibes into the atmosphere because The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, papery edition, is now being published in the UK by Particular Books Penguin! An imprint which is officially described […]Sydney Padua
- Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Year! January 18, 2015That’s right folks! If Ada Lovelace owes you money that’s just too bad because she was born 200 years ago on December 10th, 1815! There are lots and lots of THRILLING celebrations and events in the planning, many of which feature (naturally) ME, so stay tuned for dates and announcements and Lovelacey goodness this year. […]Sydney Padua
Vector News Feed
- Dyalog15 in Sicily, 6-10 Sep February 19, 2015 Stephen Taylor
- APL Germany Spring Meeting 2015 January 31, 2015 Stephen Taylor
- FinnAPL Forest Seminar 2015 December 5, 2014 Stephen Taylor
- Dyalog 14 videos October 6, 2014 Stephen Taylor
- APL Germany Autumn Meeting, 27-28 Nov, Berlin October 1, 2014 Stephen Taylor
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!