Apl Quotes

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working

Heppenheimer’s Shoppe was now the Stars and Stripes, trying to convince its customers that the owners were patriots, begging them not to turn them in to the local APL. A

For fleet air defence, by far the most important seems to have been the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL) in Buffalo, New York. To some extent BuAer’s relationship with CAL paralleled that between BuOrd and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), except that APL became system developer for several important surface-to-air missile systems (Typhon, Aegis, Sea Sparrow and RAM) as well as an essential source of analysis.

Seibel: Other than the possibility of implementing it at all, how do you decide whether your interfaces are good? Steele: I usually think about generality and orthogonality. Conformance to accepted ways of doing things. For example, you don't put the divisor before the dividend unless there's a really good reason for doing so because in mathematics we're used to doing it the other way around. So you think about conventional ways of doing things. I've done enough designs that I think about ways I've done it before and whether they were good or bad. I'm also designing relative to some related thing that I've already designed before. So, for example, while looking at the specifications for numeric functions in Java, I'd already done numeric functions for Common Lisp. And I'd documented numeric functions for C. I knew some of the implementation pitfalls and some of the specification pitfalls for those things. I spent a lot of time worrying about edge cases. That's something I learned from Trenchard More and his array theory for APL. His contention was that if you took care of the edge cases then the stuff in the middle usually took care of itself. Well, he didn't say it that way; I guess that's the conclusion I draw from him. To turn it around, you want to design the specification of what's in the middle in such a way that it naturally is also correct on the boundaries, rather than treating boundaries as special cases.

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels? Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities. Seibel: Surely there are still courses on building a compiler? Allen: Not in lots of schools. It's shocking. there are still conferences going on, and people doing good algorithms, good work, but the payoff for that is, in my opinion, quite minimal. Because languages like C totally overspecify the solution of problems. Those kinds of languages are what is destroying computer science as a study.

The equipment for this undertaking is being designed, built, and managed by the Johns Hopkins APL.46 The contract for the mission’s launch was awarded to SpaceX in April of 2019, and the mission is scheduled for takeoff on a Falcon 9 craft in June of 2021.47 Of interest in addition to the mission itself is the fact that experts across the world will be watching for indications of success or failure. The European Space Agency has gone so far as to design what is being called a “companion mission,” a probe that will follow the DART

The ubiquity of New Horizons and Pluto on the web, and the number of people sharing in New Horizons events around the globe, gave this flyby an entirely new kind of feel. The world had changed since Voyager, with so many new forms of communication and participation. Thanks to that, the New Horizons mission felt in many ways like the first truly twenty-first-century planetary encounter. Consider: with Voyager, to participate fully you had to be in just the right place—specifically, at JPL—at just the right time—on flyby day. For New Horizons you didn’t need to be there; the flyby was everywhere simultaneously. The events at APL, the imagery from Pluto—everything that reached Earth—went onto the internet “for all mankind,” as it were.

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels? Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.

W roku 1993 Wang i Degos ustalili, że siedemdziesiąt pięć procent pacjentów otrzymujących kwas trans-retinowy i standardową chemioterapię zostało w pełni wyleczonych. Podobnego odsetka w przypadku apl nikt wcześniej nie zdołał osiągnąć. Biolodzy potrzebowali kolejnej dekady, by zrozumieć, co się wydarzyło.