Working my way backwards through previous days' notes now...

APL

New this year, was a colocated event: The APL conference. And they invited one of the guys to come in to the Dynamic Language Symposium and talk about APLs new "object features." It was mostly an APL overview. I really liked it. Not that I'm an APL convert all of a suddent at all, it harks back to the "Get Lost" thing. Because that's how you learn stuff.

So it was an intriguing tangent. It was as much about APL itself as the objects that you can build and place in arrays. One of the amusing comments at one point, was the guy telling us that one of the founders of his company and early APL pioneers had recently retired to an island. A greek island. I guess he wanted to go somewhere he could keep using all of those characters.

Mostly I sat there appreciating what its like to be able to do this kind of array manipulation. I get this same kind of thing (without Greek binary selectors) using a combination of NumericCollections and SymbolValue. Instead of a command line interpreter input-output loop, I use a workspace. It made me wonder what a Smalltalk with these two packages in a command line input-output loop would feel like.