questions about preferences

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

My God! A mathematic programming language!

When I was at university, a lecturer told a story of how APL came about:

An IBM scientist needed to do some linear programming and was frustrated with how long it took to write out. So he decided he needed language to express this easily. When he finished, he had a page with the notation for all the actions he needed. He wrote "A Programming Language" across the top of the page, and went to lunch. While he was away, someone came in, found the page and thought, "I'd better write a compiler for this."

When the lecturer told this story, I was amused and didn't believe it. But, after my first year at IBM, I wasn't so sure. And nothing in the other ten years I spent there convinced me either way.

[KevinH]

Ths is from the people that used to ask the user to write jcl (job control language) just to submit a print job!

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by davidfor

When I was at university, a lecturer told a story of how APL came about:

An IBM scientist needed to do some linear programming and was frustrated with how long it took to write out. So he decided he needed language to express this easily. When he finished, he had a page with the notation for all the actions he needed. He wrote "A Programming Language" across the top of the page, and went to lunch. While he was away, someone came in, found the page and thought, "I'd better write a compiler for this."

I think you're probably referring to Ken Iverson. The Tech V&R thread in The Lounge has some recent posts referencing APL and its successors.

Originally Posted by KevinH

Ths is from the people that used to ask the user to write jcl (job control language) just to submit a print job!

Yes, the 'people' whose employees have probably won more Nobel prizes than any other commercial corporation and a good few well known universities

BR

[DiapDealer]

What does Nobel-prize-winning have to do with sense-making/efficiency/user-friendliness?

[BetterRed]

Even the tallest poppies sometimes deserve a little love.

There's a chance the JCL one wrote 50 years ago to print on a 360/50 running OS/360, will work on a Z/14 running z/OS today. Its then competitors either don't or barely even exist.

What ever happened to Burroughs' MCP, GE's GECOS, DEC's TOPS/10, Univac's OS/9.... Gone to graveyards every one,/Covered in dead flowers, every one./Their names forgotten... by everyone

Univac's TIP was a fine TP Monitor - pity its gone.

BR

[Notjohn]

To judge by The Official Vellum Thread on the Kboards Writers Cafe, it's more like a religious cult than a formatting software.

Mac OS users seem to have a particularly hard time of it, formatting for Kindle, so perhaps some of the adoration comes from having found a way out of the wilderness.