Hi all, I really need some idea on my next APL blog post. Anything comes up in your mind? Just anything that you think it could arouse new comers interest. Anything.

Of course, I keep using my brain on it. Nice to have additional input from experienced APLers

Do you have a link to previous posts? @jimfan

@jimfan "could biden have been using apl in his campaign?", with a photo of a seminude tennis star on the right, and a long article that boils down to "no".

@jimfan "10 ways to make apl 'readable' by inserting unnecessary whitespace and using painfully long identifiers"

@jimfan - Link to your previous blog entries on APL?

@jimfan find a low-res photo of mars' surface with anything that resembles an apl squiggle, and "apl code found on mars!"

(sorry, that should be a "?", not "!")

Alright friends, my blog is in Traditional Chinese and I guess it might not be too useful to post its URL (concerning un-popularity of the language)

But since you asked: jimfan-hk.blogspot.com

I promise you there is no built-in translation... Okay, the very last entry is about my own solution to phase 1 Q1 of APL Dyalog competition 2020.

A simple one which I was hoping to arouse new comers' interest (if there is any new comer)

Here (jimfan-hk.blogspot.com/2020/03/project-euler-008.html) I constrasted my two solutions to Project Euler Q8 which I gave in 2017 and again in 2020. There seems to be slight improvement in my understanding to the language.

@ngn Possibly be some states are still using APL for statistics things :-P

Who knows

@jimfan I plan to write my next blog on using the interface from APL to Python for data visualization. I used Seaborn (seaborn.pydata.org) for a bit of experimentation in my previous blog (optima-systems.co.uk/…), though was all raw Python. This time, I am writing a toolkit to make Python's analytical utilities available to an APLer who is not super knowledgeable in the Python dept.

Alright it's my bed time so I am going to check it out tomorrow. For me I am thinking of investigating why some 1○ 555555(put any number of 5 here) × ○÷180 is giving values close to π.

@jimfan why force yourself to blog when you have nothing to say? just wait and inspiration will come, eventually

@jimfan That is impossible, 1○ can only give values in the range [¯1,1]

Hey all, long time no chat! I hope everyone is doing as well as is manageable these days.

@ab5tract o/

@ab5tract Added BQN support to the 3270 font. Just have to wait for the maintainer to pull it.

Hey @ngn @Marshall great to read you both! I'm installing your updated 3270 now :)

I had a chance to poke at the BQN explainer functionality -- it looks really good!

@ab5tract Merging .sfd files after FontForge gets at them doesn't really work, so the PR just adds a second file—you'd have to copy-paste the glyphs in from FontForge and rebuild. I can send you a .ttf by email or some other method if you like.

There's a sample.

@Marshall I was just starting down the rabbit hole of how to actually go about getting a ttf out of it... an already extant .ttf would be awesome!

longwalker at hey dot com would be perfect

0‿0 in BQN is something that is always going to make me happy when I see it

@ab5tract Sent it.

@ab5tract There are many ways to render it and they are all adorable.

You absolutely chose a great character for strand. Not only does it visually represent the concept very well, it forms heartwarming friends in your source code

@Adám are you expecting any more answers to your "shape" cmc?

@ngn Yes. I'm waiting for someone to find my very short solution.

@Adám cool! just to be clear: it works for nested arrays and for shapes with 0s in them, right?

@ngn Yes, and for scalars too.

@Marshall thanks again for the font. I like how it looks in Dyalog APL as well as BQN! :)

@Marshall #metoo

@jimfan - If you're trying to draw people to APL, consider picking some sort of "frequently needed project" and show, step by step, how to accomplish it in APL.

I've been going through WTutor and there seems to be some oddness related to SysMenu

('SysMenu' 0) takes out all of the contents -- minimize, maximize, and exit -- as well as the intended system menu. On Form lesson 9 it mentions that 'Move' should be disabled when the movable property is set to 0, but it is still enabled in the menu. The window will not, however, move, so that's working at least :)

This is on an up to date Windows 10 laptop.

@ab5tract That's probably the issue… :-) I recommend writing to support@ about it.

@Adám Just sent.

@jimfan what types of things do you use APL for?

@Adám Ok, will do. Is ⎕WC all based on Win32 under the hood? I am/was hoping it might be based on something that would be easily ported to whatever the cross-platform GUI stuff ends up in the next .Net.

@ab5tract It is based on WinForms, so if that gets ported… However, there's a project called qWC which aims to allow basically identical code (changing ⎕ to q) to be rendered as HTML, in a browser or via CEF (HTMLRenderer).

@ngn Wat?

@Adám For me this gives a strange result on Firefox and tio, but not blink (like Chrome) or node.

@Marshall Aha, so it is the underlying JS engine that is to blame.

@Adám Could be, or it could be that ngn/apl is doing something wrong and Chrome breaks the spec to fix it, or a lot of other possibilities.

@Adám sorts are weird. Seems it's just comparing the objects, comparing which always gives false. [0,1].sort((a,b)=>1) is [0,1] in chrome but [1,0] in Firefox

though it does actually sort complex numbers somehow, huh. so i probably misread something

How can I convince people that typing weird characters isn't so bad, normally whenever I mention APL the characters are the first thing people notice, and it instantly puts them off

@rak1507 Start with pointing out their benefit in TMN, then just say that various methods exist to typing them easy and quickly mastered.

Yeah, if typing specifically is the problem, you might point out that under no system will it ever take longer to type "⌽" than "reverse".

Good point, thanks

RIDE even allows ``rev<tab>

You can also draw parallels to TeX… blah blah, nevertheless, people continue to typeset scientific papers using this. And APL's input methods are generally much sleeker than TeX.

@dzaima ah, it's first checking for equality by reference, and in the case on inequality does the broken comparison