bear8642·19 days ago·discuss> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBMI thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…
bear8642·21 days ago·discuss> "[Phoenix] repackages off-the-shelf semiconductors into devices that are virtually identical to the phased-out chips."I'm slightly surprised that _virtually_ identical chips are allowed. I expected truly identical chips to be required…
bear8642·2 months ago·discuss> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…
bear8642·2 months ago·discussHow so?I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...
bear8642·3 months ago·discussFor a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]It's been discussed here before too.[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html
bear8642·3 months ago·discuss> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regressionIndeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...
bear8642·3 months ago·discuss> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?
bear8642·3 months ago·discuss> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390xThe adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.
bear8642·4 months ago·discussLikely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.
bear8642·5 months ago·discuss> Humans trust. Their systems should too.And indeed as Thompson showed, you've got to trust at some point...https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/R209/Reflections-Trus...
bear8642·6 months ago·discuss> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come byI feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines
bear8642·8 months ago·discussThey sort of did with the Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
bear8642·9 months ago·discusshuh, can you not use the Xkb APL symbols file?I thought that compose definitions as well as the shifted layout…
bear8642·9 months ago·discussRight, thank you!I recognised the " as rank but got confused by the _ reading https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/under, it seemed to be 'rank negative' and didn't see what that did.> second nature once you internalize J, but so so foreign until you do.Indeed!
I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…