A PiLe of fun

Len Shustek reacquaints us with APL, which started its life as "A Programming Language," Ken Iverson's algorithmically-inflected conception that somehow found its way to an implementation. Shustek's post links to source code for one of the versions of APL that ran on System/360.

The software/IT core requirement for MBA students at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s consisted of a 2/3-semester MIS introduction (systems analysis, drawing pictures, sizing hardware, but no programming) and a 3-week non-credit course in APL. So I learned this occult language (it only worked on interactive terminals where characters could be overstruck) out of Gilman and Rose's APL: An Interactive Approach on a DECSystem-10, or at least learned it well enough to get a job interview with one of the consultancies that specialized in it when I arrived in D.C. (I didn't get the job). Matrix-friendly APL was wicked concise if you needed to sum up a table of sales results by product line and region—exactly the sort of tool a new MBA could use, that is, until VisiCalc came along. I enjoyed the short course well enough that I was induced, in my callowness, to write a short piece about it for the Wharton Journal, the student newspaper.

Only in Shakespeare and the APL reference manual is ravel a word.

It's been a while since the last one

Well, no project goes as smoothly as you would hope. But we can say that the new look (and content) for AARP Financial has been launched.

Scratch

Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga and his commenters turn a browser window into a notepad.

ᔥ Jon Mitchell

When maintainability and reuse just don't matter

Andrew Binstock reports on a agile software development project with the ultimate timebox: the re-election of Barack Obama.

To sort through the massed tangle of conflicting requirements and desiderata, the team did the Agile thing: It put Post-It notes on a wall and called back the users to identify features that fit these criteria. Did the feature contribute directly to getting the president reelected? And would it be needed in 12 weeks...?

But still cute

Aaron Souppouris gets a quick look at the XO-4 convertible at CES. Dan Lyons isn't impressed.

We now have an actual hundred-dollar computer. Loads of them, in fact. They're called smartphones and tablets. Many can be had for well under a hundred dollars.

This is more than can be said for the XO machine, which even now, eight years after [Nicholas] Negroponte first dreamed up the idea, still costs a lot more than a hundred bucks.

That's right. Nearly a decade into this they still can't hit their original price point.