A programming language
by Kenneth E. Iverson · first published 1962
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13HN commenters
2008–2025first – last mentioned
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Read "A programming language", where APL came from - https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Kenneth-Iverson/... - you might get more understanding why it is the way it is. It is the mathematical notation, put into, as Dijkstra…
on “Arthur Whitney's 'B' Language” ↗Not a very original suggestion, but the original book (“A Programming Language”, by Ken Iverson) would probably fit in.
on “Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)” ↗…impossible to unlearn later such a convention, even if they encounter a superior convention. On the other hand, I am among those fewer for which this is not true, so when I have first read the book "A Programming Language" of K. Iverson, on which the later APL language and its successors have been based, I have immediately recognized that the Iverson convention is much better than the school convention, and I have no trouble…
on “Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left” ↗Kenneth Iverson, "A Programming Language" (1962)
on “Ask HN: Interesting courses/books to counter a looming burnout?” ↗Some people feel at home with APL (A Programming Language) or its descendants. It was first developed by Ken Iverson as a notation to be used on paper for communicating procedures and algorithms. It was the subject of a book published in 1962, then became a…
on “Think in Math, Write in Code” ↗Very cool resource. I've just been reading Iverson's "A Programming Language"-- I'll have to put this one on my list.
on “Ken Iverson: Math for the Layman” ↗…mentioned a couple of interesting facts about Ken Iverson I'd not heard elsewhere: 1 - Iverson originally wanted to call his new language Iverson's Better Math but his company blocked this so he went for A Programming Language (APL) instead. NB. Iverson worked for IBM at the time :) 2 - Iverson passed away at a computer screen. Video was very interesting so posted link on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931929
on “How do we tell truths that might hurt? (E. Dijkstra, 1975)” ↗First, it was designed for clarity. Ken Iverson's book, "A Programming Language" is about how to compute - the language grew from teaching. Productivity, I think, stems from close connections between program and the thought process.
on “J for C Programmers” ↗Ken Iverson was also 'one guy' who formulated APL while working at Harvard University. He later wrote the APL book: A Programming Language while at IBM. I am one who thinks all of the effort that went into, and is still going into symbolic AI with Lisp will re-emerge to tie in with the current ML techniques using neural networks like ANNs,…
on “A Common Lisp library for solving linear programming problems” ↗…"abstraction" or "a focus on readability", which I think is dead wrong. All of which is at best tangentially relevant to Iverson's claim in the paper (not APL's founding document, by the way; that would be A Programming Language) that APL's notation is a way to enhance your thinking. APL has good and bad aspects, and there's a lot to discuss, but can it please be a discussion instead of these careless remarks? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCorp
on “Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)” ↗…mathematical notation failed to fill his needs, and began work on extensions to the notation that were more suitable." Then "Iverson joined IBM Research in 1960 [...] he was allowed to finish and publish A Programming Language and (with Brooks) Automatic Data Processing, two books that described and used the notation developed at Harvard. [...] At IBM, Iverson soon met Adin Falkoff [...] Chapter 2 of A Programming Language…
on “APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)” ↗…it to "1 2 3 4 5" over can also be used with * */1 2 3 4 5 meaning the product reduction of 1 2 3 4 5 meaning 120 "/" as "over" comes from a mathematical notation by Ken Iverson: APL (A Programming Language) [0][1] which Ken names "reduction" (h/t mlochbaum) > An operation (such as summation) which is applied to all components of a vector to produce a result of a simpler structure is called a reduction.…
on “Goal: Embeddable array programming language with a bytecode interpreter in Go” ↗This submission popping back up from the second chance pool got me to do some digging for the formal description of system/360[0], this is not the APL we know today but the APL outlined in Iverson's A Programming Language[1]. [0] https://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html... [1] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APL.htm
on “The Origins of APL (1974) [video]” ↗APL is named after Kenneth Iverson's book "A Programming Language".
on “Why physicists still use Fortran” ↗