Poetry

APL Blossom Time

First verse and refrain:

Back in the old days, in 1962, 
A feller named Ken Iverson decided what to do. 
He gathered all the papers he'd been writing fer a spell 
And he put them in a little book and called it APL.

Well... 
    He got him a jot and he got him a ravel 
    And he revved his compression up as high as she could go 
    And he did some reduction and he did some expansion 
    And he sheltered all his numbers with a ceiling and a flo'.

Click here to listen to an MP3 recording of Jim Brown and his Band of Renown – courtesy of http://keiapl.info/archive/. Complete, annotated lyrics can be found in Michael S. Montalbano’s “A Personal History of APL“.

The Dream

‘Tis the dream of each programmer,
Before his life is done,
To write three lines of APL,
And make the damn things run.

(unknown author; appears several places on the web including Linux Songs and Poems)

Rho, rho, rho of X

Rho, rho, rho of X
Always equals 1
Rho is dimension, rho rho rank.
APL is fun!

(by Richard Stallman – see https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Richard_Stallman)

Palindromic Expression for Phi in APL

The YouTube performance is by John Scholes, with Jonathan Manktelow as the sound engineer. The underlying limit operator was written by Phil Last. For a thorough explanation of the code, see http://dfns.dyalog.com/n_limit.htm.

Dijkstra on APL

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
It is the language of the future
for the programming techniques of the past
it creates a new generation of coding bums.

(for a good discussion, see this article by Paul Murphy on ZDNET)