From Newsgroup: comp.lang.apl
On Tue, 2/18/2025 2:53 AM, EllisMorgan wrote:
Unusual to find a reference to APL, however dated, in another newsgroup ...
I asked CoPilot a question about APL.
I asked for the one-liner that does linear least squares.
Figuring the one-liner would be famous enough at the time,
to be included in the AI training set.
And the AI *hung*. The safety timer didn't go off. It's not
supposed to spend more than 15-20 seconds or so on a question.
I figured by asking the question, it would not have a
lot of training about APL. But, it got far enough, to
pretend it knew how to program in APL. It started putting
out the "rho" character on the screen, one rho after another
rho. And with each rho, the time between characters was
getting longer and longer. (The AI was stuck in an I/O loop.)
Eventually, after ten to twenty minutes, a human must have
terminated the question, and the CoPilot setup recovered.
APL was one of the first languages I had exposure to in
High School. No instruction was given. We were told "here
is a terminal, the language is APL, enjoy". The terminal
was a Selectric with the correct type ball on it for APL.
(Well, now, a few people in the audience are drooling.)
The session was at 300 baud.
When I got to university, there was no Selectric and a jumble
of characters to represent the operators. A total mess, and
led to abandonment of APL. Just about all the facilities at
university were ridiculously bad. Teletype terminals where
they never re-inked the ink ribbon on the machine -- you could
never read the output of *anything* you did on a terminal
in uni. The mainframe line printer output was fine.
But the best part about this ELIZA story, is the gentleman
who did the port of ELIZA to APL, he didn't go to university here,
he left town. Today, he is retired with his "PhD In Artificial Intelligence". Imagine missing the gold rush of AI and retiring before it
takes off. He does a port of ELIZA -- he gets a PhD in AI...
In high school, we taught each other computer languages.
Sort of a lunchtime learning. We stopped eating lunch in
the cafeteria, because it was "the same old thing every day".
We sat in a classroom, and entertained ourselves. And a poll of
the audience, revealed people with ALGOL, COBOL experience,
and so on. And the inevitable Fortran, as that's all that
gets taught in the school systems. None of this was in depth,
it was just a quick "contrast with what you are used to".
One of the people in the room, was a "computer consultant".
He dropped out of high school, to work as a consultant full time.
I used to sit for 12 hour sessions on a Saturday, at the
university computer center, working in Fortran with
punched cards (a 360/50). The university provided accounts
for high school students. But you could only attend on Saturday.
So even though the high school teachers didn't teach
anything about computers particularly, we taught ourselves.
And the gentleman who did the ELIZA port, was part of that
room. Our high school teachers worked hard. One of our
math teachers collapsed one day from exhaustion. He was
staying up late every night, to feed our voracious
appetite for math problem sets. There was no time for
the teachers to be spinning off computer lectures.
It's too bad Selectrics were not more available, and
especially with the Greek typeball on it :-) That
makes all the difference to "thinking in APL". Having
a rubbish "approximate replacement" for the character
set, that ruins it.
Paul
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