APL/360; an interactive approach

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1. jodrellblankJul 2019
   For anyone looking to get into APL, Adám at Dyalog posts a lot of answers on the CodeGolf and Programming Puzzles StackExchange site often with expanded/explained code, and he hangs in the "APL Orchard" chatroom on SO. His profile says "always excited to [talk about] APL" and that seems to be genuine. - https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43319/ad%C3%A1...

   The most public APL dialect using the classic symbols (not J/K/Q/etc) seems to be Dyalog APL - they offer one of their older versions 14 free for non-commercial use (Windows), and they offer their current version 17 free for non-commercial use if you give them your full details (maybe Linux as well?). There is a book "Mastering Dyalog APL" by Bernard Legrand from ~2008 which is available as a PDF with companion files from: https://www.dyalog.com/mastering-dyalog-apl.htm although they have added to the language since that book was released.

   There are other APL interpreters - GNU APL, NARS2000, ngn/apl, dzaima/apl (Java/Android) in various states of development and license conditions, and the developers of the last two are also sometimes in the APL Orchard chatroom on StackExchange.

   Online there's https://tryapl.org/ run by Dyalog, and https://tio.run/# which has three APL interpreters.

   The classic 1970s book "APL\360 an Interactive Approach" by Gilman and Rose is online as a PDF here: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/ with other books as well. That's before the {} syntax for anonymous functions was added to the language, and other developments.

   Videos:

   Jay Foad while he was at Dyalog, talking through some Advent of Code puzzles with APL: https://dyalog.tv/Webinar/?v=Q_vgSN6rza0 (might want to skip the introduction of explaining the Advent of Code puzzle format).

   Aaron Hsu with Dhaval Dalal and Morten Kromberg, talking through some problems using APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsj_7tFtODk

   And anything that you get from YouTube searching for Aaron Hsu, he has several talks / presentations from high level ideas to working with trees represented using arrays.

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2. todd8Apr 2018
   I took the same course! I remember that we had been taught to calculate the voltages and currents for all points in an electrical network as vector algebra operations. Then, for one of our assignments we were expected to just learn APL on our own to write a program to do these calculations. As I recall, it wasn't too difficult using APL.

   I believe that we were given or used some sort of IBM manual to learn APL. I just searched my library and found APL/360 An Interactive Approach by Gilman and Rose, 1970[1]. However, APL was most definitely not the focus of the course so I think this was a book I bought a couple of years later in grad school for myself.

   We wrote the programs on a fancy version of a teletype machine, made by IBM, called the IBM/360 APL Terminal System. See the photos of the paper based terminal in [2].

   [1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/Gillm...

   [2] http://thenostalgicgeek.blogspot.com/2013/09/resurrecting-ap...

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