In the same theme as my last post, what's old is often new again...

While I was on vacation, I read Shasha and Lazere's new book Natural Computing and was surprised to see a small section dedicated to Iverson's APL, J and K languages.

The last and only time I used J was in 1993 for a grad school class on queueing networks.  A half-page of terse code was dropped into my paper and I was done.  I would not have wanted or been able to do this in C or Fortran.

At some point, I'd like to investigate porting a J-like language to CUDA or OpenCL.  The obvious array processing parts of the interactive language would map well onto a GPU but the language might need a scheme to ensure that enough work could be issued at once so that the GPU was fully utilized.  It would be a fun project if there was interest.

Below is a brilliant roundtable discussion on APL featuring Ken Iverson and others.  I saw it a year ago, but it's worth watching again if you've had any exposure (or mental damage from) APL/J/K.  Pour yourself some scotch, sit back and enjoy:

There is also a detailed description on this video's original page and a discussion at LtU.

Also check out Catherine Lathwell's cleverly named blog Chasing Men Who Stare at Arrays.  Catherine is working on a documentary about the history of APL language and its founders.