Do a lot of young people first experience APL through golfing, or is my perception skewed via PPCG?

@Zacharý The first I heard of APL was from my father when I was ~11 (15 years ago). He used to work with some people who wrote it. I didn't see any APL code, just a story of a strange character set and very terse code. I was reminded of it again about 5 years later, so I decided to take a look at it, but dismissed it off-hand because it was dynamically typed, functions weren't first class and there were no good FOSS APLs.

A few years after that, I became a bit interested again, so I applied for a non-commercial license from Dyalog, not realising that only the windows version was covered at the time. I sent an email, and they let me download a linux version of Dyalog, just like that. I still didn't have much of a use for it, but I started following what Dyalog were doing because they seemed like they were nice people

Okay, I wonder if code golf introduced APL for the people who didn't hear about it from family.

@Zacharý That's fairly likely - you don't hear many companies talk about using APL, and there aren't any large FOSS projects that use it. So apart from golfing, it's really only spread by word of mouth

(And maybe the student competition...)

Is there any way to do HTTP request in APL?

@Bubbler Sure, ]Load HttpCommand. Then do HttpCommand.Documentation.

@Zacharý I first read about APL when I was researching the use of non-ASCII chars in various langs, out of curiosity. What prompted me to look deeper into it was a 2010 ACM problem. There isn't anyone else even remotely mathematical in my family (economists don't count).

@Zacharý Fixed. Thanks!

Is there a good reference on K, and what implementation do people use?

@ngn I've seen your name against K before. Do you know it well, or just for golf?

@Probie "Real" K (by Arthur Whitney), versions K3 through K7 are not documented anywhere. K4 is available for free from kx.com/download. Use TIO's links for oK, Kona, and ngn/K.

@Probie I'm trying to re-implement it from scratch, for golfing and general-purpose programming. I can't say I know it well - I've never used it at work.

@Probie You can use the Q reference to get an idea about the language. Q is basically like k, except that monadic verbs have been replaced with English words, e.g. neg x instead of -x

@Probie also: oK has a manual and other docs. oK is a k6-like implementation in JS.

and of course there's Arthur's original laconic summary of k

@ngn Which version does that describe?

@Adám the lastest, I believe...

@ngn K7. Respect.

Wonder what Arthur will do after K9; K10 or Ka?

@Adám you can ask him when you meet him

Ka? What?

K9... that's definitely going to be amazing for dogs!

@Zacharý Is there a hex on K? We'll find out soon :p

@Probie It may actually be base-36, as indicated by the company name: Kx.

(BASE 36)! WOOHOO

@Zacharý Kx is gonna be awesome…

Kz though!

→ 1 message moved to The Nineteenth Byte

@Adám I always thought that comes from a C declaration of a k array: K x; where K is a typedef for a pointer to a header struct and x is the usual variable name for k arrays.

@Probie there's 0xabcdef but that's a list of chars (bytes), not an int