[HN Gopher] IBM APL2: Software withdrawal and support discontinu...
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IBM APL2: Software withdrawal and support discontinuance
Author : tosh
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-06-15 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www-01.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www-01.ibm.com)
| mlochbaum wrote:
| This might not mean what you'd expect at a glance. The agreement
| here seems to be that IBM has sold all relevant IP for APL2[0] to
| Log-On Software[1], which will now be offering essentially the
| same product and some level of support.
|
| For some time now APL2 has only barely been under active
| development, so it's not clear whether this will lead to more or
| less effort to develop the product. First released in 1984, APL2
| is now far from the leading edge of APL development. For example,
| APLs began adding control structures to free programmers from
| using Branch (Goto) for control flow in the mid-1990s (late, I
| know!). APL2 still doesn't have them. Dyalog (my former employer)
| is pretty clearly the front-runner for commercial APL at this
| point; APL+Win also sees some level of development and NARS2000
| and April are some non-commercial efforts to check out.
|
| [0] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL2
|
| [1] https://log-on.com/2021/01/26/log-on-software-announces-
| log-...
| mlyle wrote:
| Eh, this is the typical way that IBM leaves markets. Yes, you
| can still buy OS/2 from eComStation, but the end of
| organizational support and selling what remains to a small
| entity is how IBM avoids having to deal with it anymore.
| mlochbaum wrote:
| Good to know. I'm definitely not denying that this is IBM
| washing its hands of APL officially, just pointing out that
| unofficially it's been this way for a decade or two at least.
| Despite hosting the creation of APL, IBM has a distinguished
| history of neglecting it. In the early years there was some
| pressure to use PL/I instead of APL. For timesharing (when it
| was profitable, before microcomputers), APL*PLUS and SHARP
| APL took over a lot of market share from IBM by being faster
| to implement features customers wanted. APL2 was a reversal
| of this trend, but it didn't last long.
| pulse7 wrote:
| The same happened to VisualAge for Smalltalk where in 2005
| Instantiations, Inc. took over "worldwide rights for this
| product" - and is still offering it...
| kencausey wrote:
| I kind of wish that VisualAge for Java was still a thing
| but in reality it is unlikely that I would do anything more
| with it than I ever did with v1.0 and v2.0 which still sit
| on a shelf.
| robomartin wrote:
| IBM should have taken an altruistic path on APL2. They have
| made tons of money with APL over the years. They should have
| released it as FOSS. As someone who started with APL in the
| early 80's, APL2 showed a lot of promise at the time.
|
| The APL ecosystem is dead enough that having a company like IBM
| go FOSS with the language could --not likely, but it could--
| spike interest and perhaps lead to the development of "APL3" or
| whatever the next evolutionary step of the language might be
| named.
|
| From my perspective core APL is now a few decades behind the
| times. A non-trivial effort would be required to bring it into
| what it could become. And this could only be done through FOSS
| and people willing to invest time and smarts into driving this
| evolutionary step.
| neilv wrote:
| A curious question (from a long-time open source
| contributor)...
|
| From the perspective of IBM's customers of APL2 (not from the
| perspective of some other group of humanity), would it best
| suit their interests to have APL2 spun off to a company, _or_
| for APL2 to be released as FOSS?
|
| I'm wondering whether, whatever the needs of those APL2
| customers, perhaps the company would be more likely to
| satisfy those needs, compared to waiting for whatever emerges
| from FOSS?
|
| (Of course, with FOSS, multiple companies could emerge, and
| also be motivated to compete. But they'd be competing with
| each other, and with free FOSS undercutting them, for
| possibly a small pool of customers that might not grow much.
| And I don't know whether it'd be viable to invest in that
| slice of customers, or to even be in that business at all?)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| From my perspective as someone who's seen this happen
| before:
|
| "Released as FOSS" means "We have withdrawn life support
| and it will now die a slow lingering death. Have fun with
| that." Unless you can spare the resources to maintain it
| yourself, this marks the point when it's officially time to
| migrate away immediately.
|
| "Spun off to a small company" means "Someone has now been
| _personally_ incentivized to take care of it. " It's
| certainly not guaranteed to survive long-term, but it's at
| least been given a chance at revitalization. It's probably
| worth sticking around for a while to see what happens.
| kevincox wrote:
| FOSS is almost certainly better all else being equal. But
| what IBM's customers probably care far more about is the
| availability of support.
| slver wrote:
| I know the cultural understanding among developers is that
| FOSS is "altruistic", but that's often wrong.
|
| It's all about incentives. If there's no incentive behind an
| OSS community working on this project, it'll just burn out a
| few naive souls, and kill off the project for the rest.
|
| Giving the project to a company which has commercial interest
| in maintaining it and supporting it through commercial
| licensing could mean a better future for APL2.
|
| This aftermath is very typical when a project is
| "interesting" from commercial perspective, but it's quite
| "boring" from technical/enthusiast perspective.
|
| I'm not saying it's ALWAYS one way or another. But it depends
| on the APL2 audience.
|
| We gotta start seeing FOSS as a tool, not as charity or as
| some sort of "giving to the world". We're engineers, or at
| least we should think as engineers. Engineers know no
| solution is just "best" at everything. Everything has pros
| and cons, and you need to consider things in context. That
| also applies to IP management with regards to what's best for
| a project's continued existence.
| aliasEli wrote:
| This it the end of an era. Although most people will have never
| seen it, APL was a pretty influential programming language. It is
| the main reason that Kenneth Iverson received the Turing award.
|
| It uses its own character set, which makes it possible to write
| very programs that performed quite complicated calculations. The
| down-side is that programs are generally hard to understand by
| outsiders (like yourself next year). All people that complain
| that Perl is difficult to read, should certainly try APL.
|
| When IBM stops supporting some technology, you can be certain
| that it is absolutely commercially dead. RIP.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| APL was special among the early languages in that it had memory
| management, implicit types, highly optimized support for
| multidimensional array operations, and composable functions. It
| was the language for anything mathematical. The characterset
| was actually a plus: it allowed the experienced user to read it
| as one reads math, which in turn made experimentation and
| algorithm optimization extremely fast. The downsides of course
| being the technical debt at all levels of the stack: from the
| files filled with code which one is wise to not touch, to the
| characters which date back to the days of pressing backspace on
| a typewriter to combine multiple symbols, to the machinations
| necessary to roll out interpreted code to someone else's
| system...
|
| Well, since the rise of Matlab (and now Numpy) there are
| alternatives which fill APL's niche, but I do miss the elegance
| of everything being an array.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > When IBM stops supporting some technology, you can be certain
| that it is absolutely commercially dead.
|
| IBM exited the desktop/laptop PC market in 2005.
|
| "Absolutely commercially dead" is not quite how I would
| describe it.
| coldacid wrote:
| Yeah, it's more like "when IBM stops supporting some
| technology, you can be certain that they can't make any more
| dosh off of it."
| geocar wrote:
| > When IBM stops supporting some technology, you can be certain
| that it is absolutely commercially dead. RIP.
|
| IBM got out of the laptop business almost 20 years ago.
|
| > The down-side is that programs are generally hard to
| understand by outsiders
|
| I think there are a lot of people who believe they understand
| Python because it kindof looks like Java. I wonder if they
| leave their shoes tied overnight or if they check a tutorial on
| YouTube every morning.
|
| > It is the main reason that Kenneth Iverson received the
| Turing award.
|
| Array programming is probably _the_ most interesting piece of
| technology I have seen in over thirty years of programming.
|
| If you can't read it, it's like saying you can't lift. No of
| course you can't lift unless pull you lift. That's how it
| works. The good news is it's easier than you think.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > I think there are a lot of people who believe they
| understand Python because it kindof looks like Java.
|
| Have you actually met anyone who's asserted that Python "kind
| of looks like Java", let alone that its resemblance to Java
| makes it easier for them to understand? I've written both
| Java and Python, and out of all the things I could imagine
| saying about Python, "Boy, this is sure kind of like Java"
| would be very, very far down on the list.
| geocar wrote:
| > > I think there are a lot of people who believe they
| understand Python because it kindof looks like Java.
|
| > Have you actually met anyone who's asserted that Python
| "kind of looks like Java"
|
| That's unfair.
|
| > let alone that its resemblance to Java makes it easier
| for them to understand?
|
| Yes, but maybe not in the way you're expecting.
|
| Guido himself remarked on many of their similarities back
| in 1997[1]; They definitely have a very similar execution
| model, the syntax can be directly translated almost like a
| cheat-sheet[2], and yeah, I think people can _easily_
| convince themselves into thinking the knowledge -- even
| superficial knowledge like the aesthetics of one language
| can help them "comprehend" the other. If you haven't
| observed this, I think you either haven't been programming
| that long or you're just _trying_ to look at what I 'm
| saying too narrowly in an effort to troll for a fight. And
| it's not just Python: Norvig even (reportedly) almost
| convinced himself (in this way) that Python is the same as
| Lisp[3], and that's just bananas!
|
| Now, if you _still_ don 't know what I'm talking about,
| this next thing isn't going to make any sense at all
| either, but I'm hopeful you can try to understand after
| some reflection, and if not you, someone else who reads
| this with an open mind: If you are using one language to
| understand another, you're _not_ actually understanding
| that language.
|
| That has a _very_ significant implication that turns out to
| make Array programming _really hard_ for experienced
| programmers: Because you already know Java when you learn
| Python (for example) you _think_ you 're learning Python
| faster than you actually are. It _still_ takes a few years
| to get really good at Python, but in the meantime, you can
| lean so heavily on your Java-think you don 't even realise
| it. You've benchmarked the rate at which you "learn", and
| you just can't _get_ APL, so you might just say something
| impossibly stupid like "APL is hard to understand" when
| Iverson won a freakin' Turing award for how understandable
| it was[4]!
|
| Maybe that helps you understand what I mean, but if not,
| maybe this[5] will.
|
| [1]: https://www.python.org/doc/essays/comparisons/
|
| [2]: http://math-
| cs.gordon.edu/courses/cps122/handouts-2014/From%...
|
| [3]: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/ooh-ooh-my-
| turn-wh....
|
| [4]: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
|
| [5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBtqhq5P28
| excitom wrote:
| I would agree that APL fits into the category of a "write-only"
| language, but it's amazingly powerful.
|
| My first project many years ago was working on the IBM 5100
| "portable" computer (a 50 lb suitcase sized thing). It had a
| toggle switch in front that could boot it into a Basic
| interpreter or an APL interpreter.
| mimixco wrote:
| I had one in my bedroom as a kid, complete with the enormous
| (100 lb?) dual 8" disk drive. My stepdad inherited it after
| his father passed. It was brand new and they hadn't turned it
| on. I had a great time with it and later become a mainframe
| developer at IBM!
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Maybe the IBM of old but the current IBM is more of a financial
| engineering company that happens to have some technical
| divisions.
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