Hooray for arrays
summary
APL traces its notation to Ken Iverson and supplies built‑in array and matrix primitives that let expressions like sum(x) over tally(x) become a tacit fork instead of an explicit loop, with a single character for reduce and no operator precedence to remember. APL powered early mainframe personal computing and spreadsheets; Arthur Whitney’s stripped subset evolved into kdb, the fastest time‑series database for ~30 years used in trading. Claim: vector ops give much lower code volume and orders‑of‑magnitude energy savings for local LLM training.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to array languages
- 3:58Ken Iverson’s early life
- 10:48Iverson at Harvard and IBM
- 16:53State in computing and APL
- 23:00APL as thought tool
- 30:14Tacit programming in APL
- 32:24Software development reflections
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