The UK has an extremely entrepreneurial culture as well, which is shown in the data (number of businesses registered, number of startups, both per capita), it ranks very highly, along with other indicators of innovation, it might not be as entrepreneurial as the USA, but globally it ranks very highly. The fact that you mention the Soviet Union and its central planned economy and the (outdated and stereotyped view of the) British class system almost like they are equivalent really undermines your point as well.
Other's have mentioned that Forth isn't an esoteric language, however if you want a Forth written for an esoteric language I have written one for SUBLEQ (see https://esolangs.org/wiki/Subleq). Although SUBLEQ is more of an esoteric machine than a language, it also sort of qualifies as one (and has an entry on the esolangs Wiki).
I have heard that this is how it is done before. I wonder how that works with a third party? If they happened to come across the binaries some how they could demand the source. I also wonder if that clause is enforceable.
AIUI the entity distributing it has to provide the source. So if Google were to (try to) (re-)distribute that compiler, they'd be legally fucked because they'd have to provide the source… which they don't have and can't get.
(But presumably that agreement also restricts Google from redistributing the binaries anyway.)
Is there an implementation of an APL language (or other any other array language) written in *readable* C that is around 1000 LoC? There are for LISP, FORTH, Prolog, TCL and the like.
Unlikely, at least for what I think you mean by "readable" here.
APL isn't really one of these exhibitions of computational simplicity in the way of the languages you mention. It's inventor, Kenneth Iverson, was more focused on the human side of thinking in and using the language.
Forth, Lisp, et al are quite easy to implement, but they require considerable library layers on top to make them useful for expressing application-level logic, even if we just focus on the pure functions. APL, on the other hand, has a larger core set of primitives, but you're then immediately able to concisely express high-level application logic.
Are you looking for a kind of reference implementation for learning purposes? If so, I'd say the best route is just go with the docs. Arguably the Co-dfns compiler is a precise spec, but it's notably alien to non-practitioners.
Any pointers on how to get better at expressing high-level application logic in APL? Any good resources on programming in APL? So far I have only found tutorials and basic stuff for learning APL but not much on applying APL. I am slowly improving and think I sort of get it but probably don't.
Not that I know of, unfortunately. This is, IMHO, the biggest pain point of APL pedagogy at the moment. I'm actually working on some resources, but they're still gestating.
For non-event driven systems, the short story is to organize application state as a global database of inverted tables and progressively normalize them such that short APL expressions carry the domain semantics you want.
For event driven systems, we have token enumeration over state machines, which can be expressed as literal Branches to state blocks.
Granted, the above likely doesn't communicate well unless you're already primed with all the necessary ideas. If you're interested, I'm willing to chat. Email is in my profile description.
>IMHO, the biggest pain point of APL pedagogy at the moment
It is the one that always trips me up. I just started in on my third attempt at learning APL/array languages, both previous times I got to the same point where I was mostly at a loss of how to apply it all. So I move on and forget all that I learned until the next time and have to start over. Thankfully the last attempt seems to have mostly stuck as far as keyboard layout goes, makes progress much quicker.
I may take you up on that email offer once I get a bit further along in this current attempt, can't quite form reasonable questions yet and only know what tripped me up in the previous attempts. I believe you are a regular on APL Orchard? I will be joining it soon so perhaps will see you there.
The logic of the system instead of the pieces of the system; how the language's core data structure applies/relates towards expressing that system. I could very well be overthinking things and seeing some sort of magic which is not there but this line in the previous response to me, makes me think I am still missing a piece of the puzzle:
>organize application state as a global database of inverted tables and progressively normalize them such that short APL expressions carry the domain semantics you want.
Ok. I have some idea I think of where you are at, so I will give it a shot. I think this sort of thing is an emergent property in the design of APL applications, and so there's nothing to "see" in terms of an example unless you can see that design process.
But first, "database" here is just the list of global variables. If that wasn't obvious, it is important.
My application processes weblogs, and "clicks" is the bit-array of which event was a click (redirect), as opposed to having a variable called "weblog" which contains a list of records each possibly having an event-type field.
Normalizing them that acknowledges that the weblog (input) probably looked like the latter, but it's easier to do work on the former. APL makes that transformation very easy: Just rotate the table. In k this is flip. Simples.
Those "domain semantics" are simply the thing I want to do with "clicks" which in my application comes from the business (users), so I want them to provide a bunch of rules to do that.
Look carefully at the tables, because they're given in a slightly different way, but they are the same. And these are all of them, so it should be obvious at this point you can represent any boolean operation against any matrix of variables with a matrix of these numbers.
For example, you might have a sql-like expression (from a user of your application) of x=y, and x<y and so on that you want to use to filter some data set.
Now if you are to think about how you might do this in Javascript (for example; probably in scheme too) you would probably organise such a table as a chain of closures. And I think if you look at any ORM in just about any language you'll see this kind of pattern (maybe they use classes or use a tree, but these are obviously the same as closures), but such a tree can only be traversed, and the closure can only be called. Maybe you can batch or shard, but that's it, and since I would bet there are a lot of dependant loads/branching in this tree of closures, it is slow.
But if you understand that this tree is also a matrix of boolean operators, it is obviously parallelisable. And each operation is simple/cache-friendly and so therefore fast. This leads to your "queries" being a set of projected indexes or bitmaps (whichever is convenient), which you probably also store in global variables someplace (because that is convenient) while you're doing what you need to do (make xml, json, bar charts, run programs, whatever)
I may be reading too much into this but it sounds like you’re searching for templates to stimulate ideas similar to how there are examples for smaller puzzle type problems.
I think most sizable stuff is proprietary. I implemented an lsp in an open source K which uses json/rpc. But the open source K is probably best considered a hobby project.
Beyond what others have mentioned, I think another big differentiating factor between APL and the rest of those languages is that APL isn't focused on allowing the user to expand the language meaningfully, but rather on being a well-rounded language by itself (which is how it can be reasonably useful without objects with named fields, mutation, explicit loops (or only gotos in APLs infancy!), no first-class functions, no macros, and only one level of higher-order function (though of course most APL implementations have some of those anyway)).
As such there's really no pretty "core" that pulls its weight to implement in 1000LoC and is useful for much.
Couple that with an implementation of whatever primitives you want, and a simple AST walker, and you've got a simple small APL interpreter. But those primitive implementations already take a good chunk of code, and adding variables/functions/nested functions/scoping/array formatting/etc adds more and more bits of independent code.
Perhaps if you accept defining bits in the language in itself via a bootstrap step, BQN is a good candicate for existing small implementations - a BQN vm + minimal primitive set is ~500LoC of JS[0] (second half of the file is what you could call the native components of a stdlib), 2KLoC for first public commit of a C impl[1], both of those having the rest of the primitives being self-hosted[2], and the compiler (source text → bytecode) being self-hosted too[3]. (the C impl also used r0.bqn for even less required native primitives, but modern CBQN uses very little of even r1.bqn, having most important things native and heavily optimized)
I had a lot of fun writing this and it is great to see this submitted here, I just did it to see what was possible. It is an incredibly niche processor with little practical use. If you have any questions let me know.
I have also started contracting in the UK and I'm looking for work, details are in my profile.
Nothing involving forth (only Java really) where I'm working, but I wanted to send some appreciation for Embed forth (meta-compiler), the documentation is particularly good :)
It’s unlikely to find paid Forth work, though I hope there is still someone hiring engineers that write Forths and LFSR CPUs in their spare time. One will find they are quite versatile and eager to learn :)
I know that's what I do! It's a fun exercise, and Forth is uniquely suited to writing Forth interpreters. Forth really only has a few areas where it excels and they are incredibly niche ones at that.
The full quote would be "The dmac and smac are pretty self-explanatory fields. They contain the MAC addresses of the communicating parties (destination and source, respectively).", it does explain them. However, this is an article about how to make a network stack, it is safe to assume the reader should know something about networking before hand.
As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.
