| Notation as a tool for thought, of course! In quoting the article you conveniently leave out that Personal View dates back to 1991 and, technically, had it's foundation in the years prior to that because of just how frustrating it was to use APL during that awkward time in computing. I am not sure if you know APL, ever used it and for how long. I go way back. I was in the thick of it as the IBM PC came out and various APL packages tried to make the transition. I started using APL on time shared mainframes over Honeywell and DEC teletypes and Tektronix storage CRT terminals, that's how far I go. It was down-right frustrating. On the PC, APL interpreters had to ship with a character ROM for the monitor card just so you could see the characters on the screen. In the process you'd lose about half of the ASCII table to APL. If you wanted to print APL characters you had to buy specific printers, like the IBM Selectric and install a special APL ball with APL characters. A few got clever and installed a physical toggle switch on the computer to switch between APL and ASCII character sets. Yeah, you had to crack open your computer and change a chip just to be able to see APL chracters! I wrote and presented a paper at an APL conference in the early 80's. Back then you had to submit the paper in print for reproduction. I had to write my own APL paper printer program to drive an IBM Selectric such that it would pause and allow me to change the printer's character ball to print code sections in the paper. You really truly had to want to do APL in order to be willing to endure this kind of pain. The lucky ones had Tektronix storage CRT terminals or IBM terminals with built-in APL characters. Eventually dot matrix technology made things easier. Yet, we were still crippled by the limitations of ASCII and having to live this dual life of needing APL characters to program and regular characters for the "user space" application. That being the context, Ken Iverson buckled to the pressure and transliterated APL to ASCII characters, something that would result in J. This, of course, was extremely short-sighted and went exactly counter to the power he found on notation as a tool for thought. A man who devoted no less than twenty years to developing the beautiful and powerful concept of a notation for describing digital systems and programming, simply made the wrong call just as technology was about to make the use of such notation simple and universally accessible to all. J is not APL. Far from it. The power is in the notation. J throws that away. It's a shame. |